


Dangerous Secrets

by PrinceofDarkness15



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Ben Solo is an undercover agent, Consensual Sex, Eventual Sex, F/M, Falling In Love, Loss of Virginity, Resolved Sexual Tension, Russian Mafia, Sexual Tension, Undercover
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-29
Updated: 2020-07-02
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:13:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 29,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24971374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrinceofDarkness15/pseuds/PrinceofDarkness15
Summary: Ben Solo is an undercover agent sent to Jakku Ridge to investigate the Russian mafia who is ruled by the Vor or Armitage Hux as he's more commonly known. The Vor, however as a target---Rey Kenobi. A splitting image of his departed and beloved Kira. Posing as a business man, Ben engages with Rey hoping to not only protect her but find out more about Hux, only he doesn't expect to fall madly in love with her.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo
Comments: 18
Kudos: 22





	1. Chapter 1

Solo's mission was over. So why was he still here, on a frozen hilltop, watching a burial that was taking place in the valley below? It was cold, even for the start of November. The undertakers' assistants even found it hard to break the frozen ground for the large mahogany and brass coffin lying on the grass a few feet away. The harsh sound of their shovels rang like steel and carried easily in the bright, cold air.

A few people stamped their feet on the snowy ground, trying to warm themselves up, then looked around uneasily. It wasn't done to look uncomfortable at a burial site, so they surreptitiously rubbed their hands, arms and huddled miserably in their winter coats, hoping it would all be over soon.

Solo was already in his hiding place two hundred feet up in the wooded hillside, watching through the Steiner 8x30 tactical binoculars he'd kept from his Delta days. He didn't stamp his feet and he didn't huddle. The cold didn't bother him, not anymore. The heat didn't bother him either. And he didn't care about what the onlookers felt. He was here for one purpose and one purpose only.....the widow.

She stood apart from the rest of the onlookers, stiff, bareheaded and dressed in all black. She didn't even seem to notice the cold surrounding her. In fact, from Solo's perspective, she didn't really seem to notice...anything. She didn't fidget, she didn't even move. She just stood there, small and straight, watching dry-eyed as the assistants laboriously dug. It seemed to take forever.

The undertakers' breath rose in white plumes of vapor and their breathing grew harsh, like workhorses pulling a heavy cart. Finally, after what seemed an eternity, it was over, and there was a coffin-shaped hole in the icy-cold ground. 

As if by an unspoken signal, the onlookers quickly gathered around the young widow. An elderly gentlemen dressed in a black cashmere overcoat briefly cupped her elbow and bent down to her. She shook her head at him and he immediately stepped back. The pastor, a young, pasty-faced man, opened his heavy Bible and read a page that been marked beforehand with a long white silk bookmark.

He read slowly and solemnly while his nose turned a bright red in the stillness of the cold. At last he came to the end of the passage, closed his Bible, and bowed his head to pray. Everyone else bowed their head, too, except for the widow, who continued to stare stiffly ahead of her. The elderly elegantly dressed lady with the elderly gentlemen tried to talk to the window, but immediately stopped when her companion laid a gentle hand on her arm.

He looked at her and shook his head. She looked confused, then stepped back. The assistants had placed inch-thick ropes underneath the coffin which had been maneuvered over the gaping hole, and were slowly, laboriously easing it down. The coffin was huge, heavy.

The assistants grunted with strain, the sound carrying all the way up the hillside. Finally, the coffin reached the bottom and the assistants stepped back respectfully. The preacher spoke to the widow and the moved for the first time, bending gracefully to grab a handful of earth. She walked over to the rim of the hole in the ground, threw the handful of earth onto the coffin, then looked up blindly.

Solo stepped back sharply. It wasn't that he was frightened of being seen by her. After all, he was a master of camouflage and he had chosen his lookout wisely and well. There wasn't a chance in hell he'd be spotted. What hit him like a punch to the stomach was the raw, naked pain on the widow's face. A lovely face. A face he'd kissed more times than he could count.

 _Stop that_ , Solo told himself. _Think of the mission._

He lifted his powerful binoculars again and the graveside sprang back into focus. The quiet ceremony was finally over. The onlookers were slowly moving away, grateful to get back to warmth and life and away from the cold hand of death hovering over the scene.

The widow was the very last to leave, on the arm of the elderly gentlemen. Suddenly the widow stiffened and stopped. She whirled around and ran back over towards the grave, where the grave diggers were already shoveling dirt over the coffin. The widow stopped just at the edge of the hole and the tears that were coming freely now streamed silver over her beautiful face.

She knelt in the dirt and slipped her wedding ring off. She brought it to her lips, kissed it, and reached down to place it gently on the coffin lid, her hand lingering for a long moment, as if she couldn't bear to break this last contact. The elderly gentlemen walked slowly back towards her. When she showed no sign of standing on her own, he cupped her shoulders, urging her to feet again. She stood and allowed herself to be led away, stopping just once to turn and gently blow one last kiss behind her.

It really was a heartbreaking scene and Solo felt his heart grow heavy with sorrow, then he shook himself. _Foolishness_ , he told himself impatiently as he started taking precautions to erase all traces of his presence from the underbrush. 

He had to leave, right _now_. He had no business being here at all. The mission was over, for him at least. Still, it wasn't every day that a man got watch his own funeral.

* * *

At first light, as agreed, the pilot was waiting, alone, at the bottom of the rolling stairs. It was an undeclared flight with a plane that didn't officially exist and no co-pilot would be welcomed. The fewer people involved, the better. They were on a runway on the far side of the military airport, which had been decommissioned when the Soviets had lost power. A pilot and a nuclear engineer. 

They had only been told first names, Alyosha and Eike. Both names were false, of course, but it didn't matter. The nuclear engineer, whose real name was Alexandre Gregorvitch, knew the only thing about the pilot that was necessary---that he was a _zek_ , a former guest of the Russian Gulag.

They were members of that very exclusive club----men who didn't die in the Russian Bear's cruel embrace. The two men didn't shake hands. But when the pilot stretched out his hand to help Alexandre maneuver the hand truck to shift the heavy container from the van to a loading pallet, Alexandre saw what he expected to see---a barbed-wire tattoo around the pilot's wrist. 

All former prisoners had their experience in hell etched onto their skins, not just their souls. Alexandre was literally covered from head to toe in tattoos, from the stars on his knees that meant he bowed to no man, to the crosses that were a symbol of the years that he had spent in the Gulag. And he wore them proudly. The only part of his skin that was untouched was a large, shiny scarred patch over his heart were once had been the tattoo of the distinctive, goateed Tatar features of Lenin. 

Soviet prison guards were a very superstitious lot and would never shoot the holy image of Lenin. The day the camp fell, he'd stolen a soldering iron from the deserted guards' barracks and burned the head of Lenin off himself.

He hadn't even felt the pain, in fact, he had been so happy to rid his body of that monstrous image. The two men, Alexandre and the pilot, silently noted each other's tattoos. Nothing more needed to be said between them. They were equal members of the Bratva, the Brotherhood. That was all they had to know.

The heavy container was lifted into the cargo bay of the Tupolev Tu-154 aircraft, where the pilot then carefully strapped it into the bulkhead. Inside the container was a large lead-lined canister filled with cesium 137, enough for a very powerful dirty bomb. Enough material to close down, the city center of London, or New York, or even Paris, or Rome or Berlin, or Washington, D.C for that matter.

Wipe it completely off the face of the earth as a viable city, turn it into a deserted concrete canyons forbidden to humans or any other life-form for at least ten-thousand years. The pilot closed the cargo bay door and entered the small cabin where Alexandre had observed the stowage of the container.

"Is everything all right?" the pilot asked quietly.

Alexandre knew just exactly what he meant. He wasn't offended. This was, after all, _very_ dangerous business. Though he was a superbly well-trained and careful nuclear engineer, and had taken all the necessary precautions, the pilot couldn't know that. Instead of answering, however, Alexandre opened his briefcase and extracted a small Geiger counter. He then switched it on, walked to the cargo bay, and waved it the container.

They both listened to the welcome sound of soft, gentle ticking. The Geiger counter was picking up the ambient radiation, higher than normal in the area surrounding a nuclear power planet, but nothing more than that. The pilot nodded, satisfied, and without another word made his way to the cockpit.

Alexandre walked down the steps and onto the tarmac. There was one thing more to take care of before takeoff. Telling the Vor that the first stage of the mission was complete. If this trip proved successful, there were many more such trips in the future. 

His Vor, an already powerful and rich man, would become one of the most powerful men in the history of the world. Alexandre opened the green cell-phone that he pulled from his back-pocket. He had three of them, one for each stage of his long journey. Three brand-new cell phones, onetime use only. He dialed a long number, connecting to a remote mansion in the northern state of Vermont, in the United States.

The cell-phone was encrypted. If there was one thing guaranteed to catch the attention of America's frighteningly powerful electronic surveillance agency the NSA, it was an encrypted cell-phone message to the United States. 

So there was no encryption and no nonsense about packages on their way or delivery times. The NSA's endless banks of supercomputers, trolling daily and tirelessly through a database spanning the globe, was trip-wired with a number of key words, _package_ and _delivery_ , being two of them, that would have immediately picked up on those two words. The Vor's money had bought services of one of the junior NSA officer's ad the Vor had a list of words. The Vor thought of everything

.No packages or delivers. Their code was the weather. The cell-phone at the other end was pick up immediately. It, too, was a one-off, to be destroyed after the message. Alexandre had memorized each of the Vor's one-off cell phone numbers, though they were at least twelve digits each. A laughable exercise, really. Child's play. In Kolyma, numbers kept him sane. 

He'd memorized PI to the thirteenth decimal, prime numbers up to the first five hundred, and had perfected in his head a risk calculation method the Vor used to this very day. The Vor himself, a literary genius in his own right, had memorized every word of Pushkin's _Queen of Spades._

Sheev Palpatine, the greatest man in the world. The man who'd saved his life, and, perhaps most important, his sanity in Kolyma. His Vor. 

" _Slushayu_. I'm listening."

The Vor's deep voice, with it's cultivated Muscovite accent, reassured Alexandre at the deepest possible level that all was right in his world.

"Greetings," he replied, looking up at the black clouds roiling in the sky overhead. A fierce Siberian wind was blowing, and the temperature was well below freezing. He huddled more deeply into the sheepskin jacket that the Vor had bought him. "I just thought you might like to know that the weather here is perfect. Sunny skies. Very warm weather."

"Excellent, I can retire now in peace. Tell Hux he is ready.” the Vor replied. "Stay safe, my friend."

Content that this enormously important project was off to a good start, Alexandre removed the cell-phone's SIM card, threw it into the woods, where it disappeared into the dense undergrowth with a whisper of rustling leaves, and crushed the plastic casing of the phone beneath his heavy boot. Alexandre trotted back up the steps, sat down in the leather seat, buckled up, and made himself comfortable.

This was the first stage of what was going to be a very long journey. The cabin was quiet and comfortable. The pilot had chosen well. The Tu-154 could take off from the gravel runway of the abandoned military airfield and could fly above the rest of Russian air traffic. They were in the lower reaches of Siberia, the largest and most inhabited land mass in the entire world. 

They would reach their destination---a remote airfield near Odessa---in about twelve hours, stopping only once to refuel. Then, to Budva, in Montenegro, by bus. From there, a ship would be waiting to take him and his cargo to Canada. The final leg would be a truck crossing into the United States, into Vermont. The pilot quietly announced that they would be taking off in one minute.

Exactly sixty-seconds later, the sleek plane taxied, then lifted, heading west.

* * *

The man with the shattered hands and the shattered soul used his stylus to punch the OFF button his cell-phone. He still had the used of his index finger and thumb, but only as a pincer. The zealous prison guards who had taken a hammer to his hands had been thorough. He could use the stylus to tap out letters on a keyboard or a number pad. He could feel himself. He could pick up a glass of vodka. It was enough.

Armitage Hux glanced outside the big picture window of his study, noting the wind whipping the big leafless oak tree's branches into a frenzy. Though it was only early afternoon, the sky was almost black.

The forecast was for snow during the night and for the temperatures to dip well below zero. The forecaster had stated all of this in his somber tones of a man announcing a certain diaster. Hux would have laughed if he had still been capable of laughter that is. How weak the American's were! How easily they dispaired!

He was a survivor of Kolyma, after all, the Soviet Union's cruelest prison camp, where the prisoners had to work the gold mines in temperatures as low as minus ninety degrees Fahrenheit.

It had been so cold that tears froze on the prisoners cheeks. They fell with a merry twinkle to the hard frozen earth in crystals which belied the hell the prisoners lived in. The _zeks_ called this place "the whisper of the stars." How many tears he'd shed when he'd lost his beloved Rosa. How the stars had whispered.

He'd written a poem about it, in ink made from burnt show leather on a piece of intact shirt, donated by a zek who, improbably, was being released. It had been published back in his hometown of Moscow. When word filtered back from five-thousand miles away that the zek Armitage Hux had written a poem about Kolyma, the guards had gone into a frenzy of cruelty. 

They'd shattered his hands, thinking a writer without hands couldn't write. Foolish, foolish men. So much had changed since then.

If the guards who'd tormented him weren't dead of vodka poisonings, they were living on the equivalent of fifty dollars a month in some rathole back over in Russia. And he--he was already rich beyond their comprehension and about to become one of the most powerful men on earth, able to switch great cities like a flick of a light.

Now only one thing seemed missing from his life: his beloved. He'd lost her back in Kolyma but he'd found her again in this small, pretty American backwater, with it's bitch trees and larches, so like the woods around the dacha they'd had outside Moscow.

Rey, she was called now. Rey Kenobi. Absurd Yankee name. He hated calling her Rey. She was Kira. _His_ Kira, though, of course, she didn't realize it yet.

But soon his charade would be over and she would be with him again. He was about to become the new Vor. Palpatine had said he was finally ready, not to mention that Sheev was beyond ready to retire and hand the business over to someone who was worthy of the name. Immensely powerful. So powerful, in fact, that he could bring Kira back from the dead.


	2. Chapter 2

"Read any good books lately?"

The pretty young woman stacking books and sorting through papers in the Jakku Ridge County Library turned around in surprise. It was closing time and the library wasn't overwhelmed with people at the best of times. By closing time it was always deserted. Kylo Ren should know. He'd been staking it out for nearly a week now.

"Oh! Hello, Mr. Ren." Her cheeks pinked with pleasure at seeing him. "Did you need something else?" She checked the big old-fashioned clock up on the wall. "We're closing up, but I can stay on for another quarter of an hour if you need anything."

He'd been in that morning, and she'd been charmingly helpful to him. Or, rather, to Kylo Ren, stockbroker, retired from Wall-Street rat-race after several years of very lucky investments paid off big, now looking to start his own investment firm. Son of Han and Leia Ren, investment banker and family lawyer, respectively, both tragically dead at a young age. Kylo Ren was a handsome twenty-nine year old, divorced after a very short-lived starter marriage in his early twenties, collector of vintage wines, affable, harmless, and a all-around good guy.

Of course not a word of that was true. Not a single word. Well, maybe partially. His parents were Han and Leia—but they were Solos and they both were still living, but, no one could know that, otherwise the whole mission would be compromised. They were alone in the library, which pleased him and annoyed him at the same time. It pleased him because he'd have Rey Kenobi's undivided attention. It annoyed him because.....because.

Because through the huge library windows she looked like a lovely little lamb staked out for predators. It had been dark for an hour up here in this frozen northern state. In the well-lit library, Rey Kenobi had been showcased against the darkness of the evening. One very pretty woman all alone in an enclosed space. It screamed out to any passing scumbag--- _come and get me!_

Nothing scumbags liked better than to eat up lovely young women. If there was one thing Kylo knew with every fiber of his being, it was that the world was full of scumbags. He'd been fighting with them all of his life.

She was smiling up at him, and she much, much prettier than the photographs of the file he'd studied on her. Sure, it was creepy that he knew things such as where she worked, where she loved, her favorite food, but it was all part of the plan.

The NSA’s plan for that matter and Solo was a man who would literally do anything he was told to do by his government—lie, seduce even kill, if necessary. However, something about Rey Kenobi seemed to tell Solo that she was not someone who was a threat or even remotely dangerous. She was innocent in every sense of the word. 

"No, thank you, Miss Kenobi," he answered, keeping his deep, naturally rough voice gentle. "I don't need to do any more research. You were _very_ helpful to me this morning."

Her head tilted, the soft dark brown hair brushing just past her right shoulder. "Well, did you have a good day, then?"

"Yes, I had a very good day. Thank you for asking. I saw three factories, a promising new Web design start-up, and an old economy sawmill that has some very innovative ideas about using recycled wood chips. All in all, very satisfactory."

Actually, it was a lie. In reality, it had been a very shitty day, just one of many shitty days on this mission. A total waste of time spent on the surveillance van with two smelly men and jack shit to show for it except for one cryptic call to Hux about a friend staying safe. Solo or Ren smiled for the satisfaction that he didn't feel, but he didn't want to ruin her day with his bullshit.

"So. It's closing time now, is it?"

She smile back. "Why, yes. Yes it is. We close at six. But as I said, if you need something---"

"Well, to tell you the truth....." Ren looked down at his shoes shyly, as if working up the courage to ask her something. 

Man, he loved looking down at those shoes of his. They were three-hundred dollar Italian imports, worlds away from his usual comfortable but battered combat boots that dated back to his army days. Being Kylo Ren, a very successful businessman, was great because he got to dress the part and Uncle Sam had to foot the bill. He had an entire wardrobe to fit those magnificent shoes of his. Who knew if he'd actually get to keep any of it? Maybe the two Armani's that been specially tailored for his board shoulders.

And even better was dealing with this librarian, Rey Kenobi, who happened to be one of the prettiest women that he'd ever seen. Small, curvy, classy with large eyes the color of a foamy sea with a hint of something darker. Kylo looked up from contemplating his black shiny wingtips and smiled into her beautiful hazel eyes. 

"Actually, I was hoping that I could invite you out to dinner sometime, you know, to thank you for your help. If I hadn't done this preliminary research here, with your help, my day wouldn't have been half as productive. Asking you out to a nice dinner is the least I can do to show you my appreciation."

She blinked. "Well.....," she began.

"Listen, you have nothing to fear from me," he said hastily. "I'm a pretty solid citizen---just ask my accountant and my personal physician. And I'm perfectly harmless."

He wasn't of course. In fact, he was dangerous as hell. Six years a Delta operator before joining the unit. He'd spent the past half decade in black ops, perfecting the art of killing people---the people who did his country wrong justice. He was sure harmless to _her_ , though.

Rey Kenobi had the most delicious skin he'd ever seen on a young woman----pale ivory with a touch of rose underneath---so delicate that it looked like it would bruise if he so much as breathed on it. That skin was meant for touching and stroking, not hurting. 

"Miss Kenobi?"

She hadn't answered his question about going out. She simply just stood there, head tilted to one side, watching him as if he were some kind of problem to be sorted out, but she needed more information before she could solve it. In a way, he liked that. She didn't jump at the invitation, which was a welcome relief from his last date---well, last fuck to be honest. Five minutes into the date after a simple "hello" in a bar she'd had his dick in her hand. At least she hadn't been into pain like Consuelo. God _help_ me. 

Rey Kenobi was assessing him quietly and he let her do it, understanding that smooth words weren't going to do the trick. Stillness would, so he stood still. Special Forces soldiers had the ultimate gift of stillness. The ones who don't, die young and badly. Kylo was engaging in a little assessment himself.

* * *

This morning he'd been bowled over by little Miss Rey Kenobi. Christ, with a name like that, with her job as chief librarian of the library of a one-traffic light town, single at twenty-five, he'd been expecting an older dried-up prune. The photographs of her in his personal files had been fuzzy, taken with a telescopic lens, and just showed the generics---hair and skin color, general size and shape. A perfectly normal young woman.

A little on the small side, but other than that, ordinary. But up close and personal, Jesus, she'd turned out to be a complete knockout. A quiet and reserved knockout. You had to look twice for the full impact of large hazel eyes, porcelain skin, shiny dark hair and a curvy slender figure to make itself felt.

Couple with a natural elegance and a soft, attractive voice--well. Kylo was used to being undercover, but most of his jobs involved scumbags, not beautiful young women. 

Actually, this one did, too--a major scumbag called Armitage Hux everyone on earth but the operatives in the Unit revered for being a great and famous writer. Even nominated for the freaking Nobel Prize, though, as the Unit knew well but couldn't yet prove, the sick fuck was now the head of a huge international OC syndicate. Kylo or who was actually named Benjamin Solo was intent on bringing him down.

So on this op he was dealing with scumbags, yeah, but the mission also involved romancing this pretty woman----and on Uncle Sam's dime, to boot. It honestly didn't get much better than that.

"All right," Rey said suddenly. Whatever her doubts had been, apparently they were now cleared up. "What time do you want to pick me up?"

 _Yes!_ Kylo or Ben felt a surge of energy that had nothing whatsoever to do with the mission and everything do with the woman in front of him. She had said yes, just like he had hoped that she would.

"Well....." Kylo smiled, all affable, utterly safe, utterly reliable businessman, "I was wondering whether you wouldn't mind going now. I found this fabulous Italian place just around the corner from here. It has a really nice bar and I thought we might talk over a drink while waiting for our dinner."

"You mean Da Emilio's," Rey said. "It's a very nice place and the food is excellent." She looked down at herself, frowning. "But I'm not dressed for a dinner out. I should go home and change first."

She was wearing a light blue-grey sweater that exactly matched the color of the book she was clutching close to her chest and hugged round breasts and a narrow waist, a slim black shirt, shiny black stockings, and pretty ankle boots. Pearl necklace and pearl earrings. She was the classiest-looking dame he'd seen in a long while, even in her work clothes.

"You look---" _Perfect. Sexy as hell._ His bit his jaws closed on the words.

Benjamin Organa-Solo, roughneck soldier that he was, could say something like that, no, he _would_ say something like that to a woman as beautiful as Rey, but Ren, _Kylo Ren_ , the sophisticated businessman, sure as hell couldn't. Even if it was God's own truth.

"Fine. You look fine. You could go to dinner at the White House dressed like that."

It made her smile, which was exactly what he wanted. Her smile was like a secret weapon of it's own accord. She sighed. "Okay. I'll just lock up here first and we can be on our way."

Locking up entailed pulling the library door closed and turning a key once in the lock. Kylo waited. Rey looked up at him, a tiny frown between her brows when she saw his sudden scowl. "Is there something wrong?"

"That's it? That's locking up? Turning the key once in the lock?"

She smile gently. "This isn't the big bad city, Mr. Ren."

"My friends call me Kylo."

"Okay then, Kylo. I don't know if you've had a chance to walk around town or not, but this isn't New York or even Burlington. The library, in case you haven't noticed, is full of books and not much else besides scuffed old rickety tables. What would there be to steal? And anyway, I don't remember the last time an actual crime was committed here in Jakku Ridge."

The elation Ben felt at the thought of an evening with Rey Kenobi dissipated. Jakku Ridge housed one of the world's most dangerous criminals. An evil man. A man directly responsible for hundreds of lives lost, for untold misery and suffering. And the worst part about it all was he was Rey Kenobi's best friend.


	3. Chapter 3

A _date._ She, Rey Kenobi, was actually going out on a _date!_ Rey hadn't been out on a date in.....God, she couldn't even remember the last date that she'd been on. There were ten bachelors in Jakku's Ridge, not counting Hux, of course, who was ten years older than she was and horrible scarred from his time in the Soviet prison camp. Each and every bachelor within a radius of forty-miles had asked her out at least once, repeatedly. Each and every bachelor was lacking something very important---teeth, a faculty, a job. Certainly all of them were lacking in sense of humor.

Rey might even have gone further afield, but ever since Amylin Holdo had gone maternity leave and then quit when her child was a preemie with problems, Rey had been more or less on her own at the library. The retired chief librarian, old Maz Katana, would come in for an emergency, but she was seventy-four and almost deaf.

And the town council kept putting off budgeting for another librarian. So Rey was more or less _it._

Plus, of course, her Uncle Cassian and her ailing aunt Jyn required her constant presence and help. Rey had a range of about forty-miles and desirable bachelors----even only bachelors that weren't repugnant---were not exactly thick on the ground in that radius. So being asked out by Mr. Kylo Ren call-me-Kylo Ren, who was indeed the most handsome man she'd ever seen---and who clearly had all of his own teeth, all his own limbs, and seemed to be independently wealthy---well, it was like Christmas a month early.

He'd come in that morning to some research on the area, saying he was thinking of making some investments. Rey had been impressed by how much he knew abut the area already, but she supposed that businessmen had to be well informed. He'd let discreetly slip that he'd retired early after some very good years with a brokerage firm and was looking to open an investment firm of his own. 

He was so outrageously handsome. Rey kept sneaking glances at him, while he wasn't looking. Tall, with midnight black hair, deep caramel-grown eyes surrounded by ridiculously long lashes, a straight narrow nose, and a firm full mouth. Hard body. Wow! 

In Rey's experience, businessmen were soft and pale. All that time spent behind a desk, making endless amounts of money. Or losing it, depending. Kylo Ren didn't look like he had wasted much time in losing money. He had all the visible accoutrements of prosperous business-dom.

The elegant navy blue suit---Armani was her educated guess---the glossy shoes, the expensive leather briefcase, the manicured nails, the flat expensive Rolex wrist-watch. But that was where the resemblance to a typical businessman stopped. Underneath the elegant suit was clearly a very strong, fit body, with amazingly broad shoulders. So at odds with the amount of time he must spend analyzing data, clipping articles, and peering into his crystal ball--or whatever it was that stockbrokers did.

It was a lovely evening. Very cold---but that was a given for November here in Vermont. The snowstorm all the weather forecasters had been talking about was still holding off and the night sky was bright with brilliant cold stars. Rey loved these clear frozen nights, and it was a good thing, too, she often thought, since moving elsewhere warm was out of the question.

Certainly as long as her Aunt Jyn was so sick. To her immediate surprise, Mr. Ren---Kylo--took her elbow, as if she could have problems navigating the broad, even sidewalk stretching out before her or needed guidance in the small town she'd grown up in. Still, it was really nice. Men rarely took one's elbows anymore.

Uncle Cassian often took her arm when she accompanied him somewhere, but it was mostly for balance. Kylo Ren certainly didn't need to hold her arm for balance. Up close, he seemed even talker. The top of her head barely reached his shoulders, even with heels on. He seemed broader, too, the shoulders incredibly wide beneath the rich black overcoat with hand stiches. Cashmere.

Her uncle Cassian had one just like it. For a fraction of a second, Rey wondered what she was doing---going out to dinner with a man she didn't even know. She'd surprised herself. He'd asked and she knew she should say no to dinner, perhaps yes to a drink in town, and then.....her mouth opened and _yes_ simply popped out. Of course, that he was handsome as sin and had a killer smile might have had something to do with it also.

Manners, too. He'd positioned himself on the outside, next to the curb. It had been years she'd seen a man deliberately place himself between a woman and the street.

The last man besides her Uncle Cassian that she'd seen doing that had been her father, always instinctively courteous with her mother. That had been over fifteen years ago, when they were both still alive. She and Kylo walked down the blocked and the turned her right, onto Niima Road, with a gentle nudge of his hand.

Halfway down the block, he stopped right outside a big black luxurious car. A Lexus, she thought, though she wasn't entirely sure. The only thing she was sure of was that it probably cost the equivalent of a year's worth salary of a librarian. He walked her around to the passenger door, unlocking it electronically with the key fob, and helped her into the passenger seat as if she were the queen of Jakku Ridge.

A second later he was in the driver's seat and helping her pull the seat belt over and down. To her astonishment, once the latch clicked, he didn't pull back but leaned forward and planted a soft kiss on her mouth. 

Rey stared at him. "What---"

He'd already put the big car in gear. He looked over at her and grinned, teeth white in the darkness of the car, as he slowly pulled out of the parking space. "I figured we're going to spend the entire evening wondering whether we'll have a good-night kiss or not, so, I thought, I'd just cut right through that. We've already kissed, so we're not going to obsess about it anymore. It's already done."

She folded her hands in her lap. "I wasn't going to obsess about a kiss."

That was a total lie, of course. She'd been obsessing about it ever since she'd accepted the dinner invitation. If she was perfectly honest with herself, which she usually was, she'd been obsessing about kissing him since she'd first laid eyes on him this morning. He was right, though. It had only been a chaste kiss--a buss, it would have been called a century ago.

But it had definitely broken the tension between them. They'd kissed. They could now have an easygoing dinner together.

* * *

 _Smart man_ , she thought. _No wonder he'd become rich._ He drove sedately out of town. Too sedately, actually. To her surprise, he kept to the speed limit even once outside of the city limits. For some reason, some feather-brained bureaucrat somewhere had declared a speed limit of thirty-five miles an hour within a ten-mile radius of town. No one in town was crazy enough to respect the speed limit, except Mr Kylo Ren. He was driving the powerful car as if he were carrying a carload of eggs over a bumpy terrain.

He braked to a complete stop at the intersection between Outpost and Fifth, where on a clear day you could see into Canada. No one stopped at that intersection unless a car was coming, which you could see from miles out in every direction.

Jakku's Ridge simply slowed down a tad, but they never stopped. Kylo Ren stopped while the light was still yellow, and waited patiently for it to cycle through from yellow to red and then, finally, green. It was nice being inside a car with a careful driver, but Rey found herself pressing her right foot to the floor, wishing he'd do it, too, silently urging him to just go a little bit faster. 

There was a thing line between driving sage and poky driving and he had already crossed it several times. Poky driving in Jakku's Ridge, where you had to work really hard to get into a fender-bender, was overkill. Getting to Da Emilio's wasn't easy. There were several turnoffs and very little signage to show you how to get there.

The locals got their easily enough, but it was extremely hard for out-of-towners. Kylo Ren didn't seem to have any problems, though. He drove straight there. The parking lot outside the restaurant was nearly empty. It would fill up later, but for now the only patrons were those here for a pre-dinner drink. He drove into the first empty slot and then killed the engine.

She smiled at him as he turned into the parking lot. "You have either a good sense of direction, an excellent memory, or both."

He turned to her, big hand draped over the steering wheel. "I have both, actually. I think they're the same part of the brain. I also have a really good memory for faces. I don't often get lost." He looked down at her bare hands. "You might want to put your gloves back on, it's really cold outside."

"Yes, mom," Rey said with a roll of her eyes, but it was wasted. He'd already rounded the car and was opening her door, helping her out. 

The little kiss had somehow changed the chemistry of evening. From being a nice thank-you gesture, the sudden invitation to dinner had turned into a real date. Sex was lingering in the air---pleasantly so. Nothing overdone, just little sparks flying about in the crystal-clear night air. Rey drew in a long, delighted breath. The air was pristine, smelling of a hundred miles of pine trees and delights wafting from the air vents of Emilio's kitchen. The smell of a wonderful evening ahead.

Her life lately had been feeling a little gray. No, not gray, really just a little....unchanging. Routine. She didn't like to admit it to herself just how much of her time and energy was taken up with Aunt Jyn and Uncle Cassian.

By the time Friday had rolled around, after she'd put in five full work days', work at the library, doing whatever was necessary for their comfort and safety, she only had enough energy to do household chores over the weekend. Slowly, without even noticing it, she started going out less and less, going to fewer movies and concerts. 

The one thing she made an exception for was her friend, Hux. When he called, she always had the time and the energy. 

Kylo opened the door for her and ushered her in with a hand to her lower back. A woman could really get used to those old-fashioned manners. Da Emilio's was, as always, warm and welcoming, with a huge roaring fire in each room. A cozy bar area beckoned off to the right and Kylo steered her toward it. The portly maître' came up to them. 

Kylo stopped and murmured, "Reservation for the name of Ren," to him, but the maître didn't pay him any attention. He just barreled on toward Rey instead. Rey sighed and braced herself.

"Ah, _Signorina_ Rey!" She was enveloped in an embrace of big hard arms and a big round belly. A hug fragrant with Versace and garlic. 

"Sergio." Rey smiled at him when he finally released her. Emilio's brother-in-law was a much more outgoing person than Emilio himself. He made a very good maître. 

"Welcome, my dear. Where have you been? Why have you not been eating here?" He held her at arm's length and looked up and down critically. "You're looking _magra_! Too thin. Have you been eating enough?" He frowned and shook his head. "Eh, what am I even saying?! Of course, not! Emilio!" he called while taking her coat and---clearly as an afterthought---Kylo's. _"Vieni qui subito!"_

Some customers walled into the door but Sergio ignored them. "Emilio!" he bellowed.

Rey winched, glancing up at Kylo. He looked amused, totally relaxed. This was such a new feeling to him, especially since all he knew was to be in control, uptight and serious 24/7. It felt good just to feel at ease with himself around another human being.

"Emilio's going to be delighted to see you, Miss Rey. Why, just the other day he mentioned you! Anna came home for the weekend and---"

"Rey!" Emilio came out from the kitchen, a tall, lean handsome man.

His food was so good, Rey couldn't understand how n earth he managed to stay so trim. Probably because he worked so hard all the time. He'd landed outside of Jakku's Ridge over twenty-years ago, a good-looking young Italian student from Bologna, hitchhiking his way through the States after college, eventually bringing his fiancée, Anna and his sister and her husband over from Bologna. God knew why he'd elected northern Vermont to settle down in, but Jakku Ridge's townspeople were grateful that he had.

Emilio folded her in his embrace, then held arm's length, looking at her critically, just as Sergio had done. "You haven't been---"

"Eating enough." Rey said on a sigh. "Yes, I know, Sergio already told me. But I am, you know. We're not all fortunate enough to have Silvia's figure."

At the mention of his beloved wife, who handled the accounts and ran their family ruthlessly and well, leaving him time to create, Emilio smile. Silvia weighted thirty-pounds more than Rey did and every ounce was composed of drop-dead curves that were magnets for male eyes.

"This is true," he said proudly. "Still, you should be eating more."

Rey refrained from rolling her eyes. It was time to change the subject. Emilio was perfectly capable of keeping this up forever if she let him.

"But enough!" Emilio held up an imperious hand and the waiter Rey would swear had been across the room materialized in a second by his side. Without even turning around, Emilio said, "Finn, two glasses of our finest Prosecco and some hot antipasti." In the blink of an eye, the waiter disappeared again.

"Come, sit down," Emilio led them to the nicest part of the bar area----comfy armchairs upholstered in brilliant red brocade ranged around an old antique door that served as a coffee table, just to the side of the huge roaring fire. Emilio sat with them, as if he had all the time in the world, though it was coming up to dinnertime and the restaurant slowly started filling up.

"How's---" Rey began, but Emilio ignored her. Her swiveled and stared over at Kylo, a frown between his heavy thick black eyebrows.

"So," he said. showing acres of white teeth in what was not quite a smile. "You're dining with Miss Kenobi. Are you a colleague?"

Kylo was sitting back, relaxed. "No, not at all. I'm more of an acquaintance. Rey did me a personal favor and I asked her out to dinner to thank her for her help."

"Have you known each other long?"

Kylo didn't even blink at the personal nature of the question and replied, "No. We just met today."

Emilio narrowed his eyes. "So, tell me, do you live in this area or are you just passing through?"

* * *

Rey gasped. Emilio was quite literally _grilling_ Kylo, exactly as if she were his daughter or sister and Kylo was some unwanted suitor. She opened her mouth to protect when she caught Kylo's smiling gaze. He winked, subtly, and shook his head. The message was very clear. _Don't interfere, Rey. It's okay. I got this!_

"Actually, I live in Manhattan at the moment, but I'm thinking of relocating and have been scouting out different areas. City's becoming a bit....too much. I'm also looking to make some investments. I retired a couple of months ago from my job in a big brokerage firm and cashed in on the bullet market before it turned south. I'd let to set up my own little boutique brokerage firm, but I haven't decided where just yet. All I know is that I wouldn't mind eventually getting out of Manhattan. So my life is pretty much up in the air at the moment."

 _How utterly clever of him_ , Rey thought. He managed to convey very neatly that he was single, well off, unecumbered, and willing to settle down here in a few short sentences. She had no idea if what Kylo had said was true or not, but it definitely got Emilio off his back. 

Emilio's faced then relaxed. "Well, enjoy your evening. It was nice meeting you, Mr...." he paused delicately.

"Ren. Kylo Ren. And the pleasure is mine."

Emilio then stood just as the waiter arrived with a bottle of Prosecco, two tall crystal flutes, and a platter full of delicacies without mouthwatering scents that he placed on the coffee table. Looked like Kylo had passed some kind of test. And not just with Emilio for that matter. Rey popped a hot _oliva ascolana_ , a stuffed breaded and lightly fried olive, in her mouth and barely kept from moaning.

"Here, try one of these," she urged. "They're---"

"Olive ascolana," Kylo said and he looked at him, surprised. He smiled. "I've got my own Emilio, back in Manhattan. Off Bleecker. Only her name is Rosa and she comes from Ancona. She makes a fabulous olive ascolana, and the best Bolognese sauce in the world." He chewed thoughtfully. "These olive's beat Rosa's, though. Hands down. That's got to be our secret." He winked again. "I won't dare tell Rosa. She’d ban me forever."

A log in the huge hearth suddenly broke apart, falling into fiery pieces in a shower of sparks. Heat blossomed in the room, painting her skin with its glow. But it wasn't just the fire warming her up. The fire was a convenient excuse for the heat, which had surged up inside her at Kylo's deliberate wink. Incandescent, almost shocking in it's power. She could feel the heat from his body, more intense even than the heat from the fire.

Or at least it felt that way. She wasn't naïve by any means. Kylo was flirting with her. It was mild, but unmistakable---the old man-woman game of cat and mouse she'd once played so well and so lightly and had almost completely forgotten. 

How long had it been since she'd actually gone out to dinner with someone attractive and flirted? Way too long, to judge by her intense reaction. Had he noticed? Those deep soft brown eyes seemed so observant. It was likely she'd flushed. Her skin was like a beacon advertising every single emotion flitting through her. This wouldn't do.

Rey forced herself to sit back, still her nerves, and smile blandly into Kylo's dark eyes, when---shockingly---what she really wanted to do was climb into his lap, nuzzle her face up against his square jaw, find out with her bare hands on whether he was hard underneath that elegant suit as she suspected.

Place her lips precisely against his throat, where she could see the fine line where his whiskers stopped. Feel his heartbeat against her mouth. Lick that smooth, pale skin. Whoa, Rey. Think of something else! By the time they’d made their happy way through the fried mozzarella balls, tiny calamari, and the huge fried Pantelleria capers, their table was finally ready. 

Their waiter, Finn reappeared as if by magic and escorted them to their table with a maximum of fuss. It was no doubt the best table in the whole restaurant and it took him a full ten minutes to get them settled. He seated Rey like an empress, whisked away a water glass with a spot on it as if it been full of cockroaches, and guided them through their orders. He suggested that they let him take care of the wine. 

“Something special for you, Miss Rey.” 

He came back a few minutes later with a bottle of Barolo from their special reserve, uncorked it deftly, and poured a finger into Kylo’s glass. But even though Kylo nodded his pleasure, it wasn’t until Rey had taken her sip and smoked that Finn finally relaxed. He needn’t have worried. It was like drinking bottled sunshine. 

“It’s wonderful,” Rey murmured. Finn beamed and disappeared in the kitchen. 

“Well.” Kylo sat back in his chair. He hadn’t taken his eyes from her face through the entire wine pouring. “I didn’t realize I’d invited royalty out to dinner. Why didn’t you tell me you were the queen of Jakku’s Ridge?”!

She smiles. “I do agree. It was a little over the top, wasn’t it?” 

“Absolutely.” He looked over his shoulder at Emilio chatting with some other guests, then back after her. “Are you guys secretly related?” 

“No, of course not.”

Though at times, belonging to the big, boisterous Luraghi family sounded so wonderful. After all, she was an only child and both her parents were dead. Her only family was her frail and ailing aunt and uncle. And once they were gone....she’d have no one, though, at times it felt like that already. 

“I, um, I helped Emilio’s daughter last year when she came to the library to do some research.” 

“From what I’ve seen, they’re grateful for something a little more serious than explaining the Dewey decimal system to a student.” 

She sipped more of that wonderful sweet wine. “We have the Library of Congress classification system.”

“Rey...” 

She sighed and told him the prettier version of the truth. “Emilio’s family is great. It’s a big one and they are all very close. Sometimes, though, that closeness can get a little...intense. His youngest daughter, Anna, felt hemmed in and used to come in a lot to the library for research projects. We became friends. She’d been having problems in school, but after a while she got back on track.” 

But it had been much more serious than that. Anna Luraghi had been cutting classes, dabbling in hardcore drugs, and moving arrow-straight toward the harder stuff---stuff that would eventually end up killing her or putting her in the hospital. She'd fancied herself in love with a nasty little weasel that Rey suspected of being a pusher. 

Anna had been on the road to complete self-destruction, so desperately unhappy with her life that Rey's heart had gone out to her. She'd spent hours and hours talking with Anna, who clearly needed an adult other than her mother or father that she could respect outside the family to talk to.

Emilio was a wonderful father, caring and always involved, but his idea of dealing with a problem was to yell at it until it went away. Anna was now at MIT, doing fabulously well and dating the cutest computer nerd on the Eastern Seaboard. Ever since, Emilio and his family treated Rey like she could practically walk on water. Kylo had listened to her with a slight smile on his lips, eyes narrowed, intent.

His eyes were just as magnificent. Dark, caramel-brown framed by black lush eyebrows any woman would kill for. They were beautiful, yet somehow managed to fit his purely all Alpha male face.

"There's more to it than that, but you're clearly not talking about it, so we'll skip over to another topic of conversation. What should it be? The weather? Books? Movies? I'd like to rule out politics and religion on principle for obvious reasons. Other than that, I'm fine with anything you choose."


	4. Chapter 4

This was startling. Rey wasn't used to men who actually paid attention to her or what she said. Who let the woman get the conversational ball rolling. Most dates listened with half an ear until the conversation bumped around to their main topic of interest---themselves. They'd make expectations for their jobs, cars and lately, plasma TV's, but that was about it. So Kylo Ren was not only the sexiest man she'd ever met, he was also highly intelligent and perspective, too.

It meant that the gentle irony she sometimes used, and always zinged right over her date's head, had to be curbed.

She smiled. "Well, books are always good for me."

"I should imagine so, seeing as you're a librarian." 

"No Marian the Librarian cracks, okay," Rey warned him, alarmed. She'd heard them all. 

His eyes were so soft. He held up a large hand, index and middle fingers raised. His mouth tightly repressed a genuine smile. "Not a one, Scout's honor."

"Were you a Boy Scout?"

"Made Eagle. Yes, ma'am, I was. Racked up the highest number in points in my troop, I did. So---getting back to you know, tell me, how did you end up becoming a librarian at Jakku's Ridge of all places?"

 _Go make a long story short_ , Rey thought. "Well, I love books in general and tend to have a reasonably organized mind, so library science seemed like a good choice for undergraduate studies."

Before taking off for Paris, her lifelong dream. And she'd almost managed it, too, with a grant study to French literature in Paris and a one-way economy-class ticket. She'd put her few belongings in storage and one foot out of the door when her Uncle Cassian had called her to say that Aunt Jyn suddenly couldn't remember the names of the days of the week.

There had been no question of what she had to do. The next day she was back in Jakku's Ridge, plane ticket completely refunded, applying for Mrs. Katana's old job.

"And why are you here?" He was listening so intently, you'd think she was telling him some thrilling tale of her life. "Why settle for Jakku's Ridge? It's pretty, sure, but it's small."

Rey repressed a low sigh. Yes, it was small. And remote. _Definitely_ not vast or rich in history like Paris, which she craved. She was here because this is where her duty lay. But that was too depressing for her to say, certainly in those terms. Rey had learned that the word duty should be used very sparingly in the modern-day world. She sidestepped. "My family's been in Jakku's Ridge for over two-hundred years."

No matter that she'd longed to escape the ties, the ties had brought her back. He filled their glasses and lifted his. "Well, if it can keep the Kenobi family happy for over two hundred years, Jakku's Ridge must have a lot of hidden virtues. I propose a toast, then, to Jakku's Ridge."

She lifted her own glass and he touched his to hers. The clear ring of pure crystal sounded and he smiled at her over the glasses filled with bright, ruby-red wine. His smile went through her like a bolt of lightning, an electric current that jolted her, inside and out. Suddenly, everything took on a heightened tone. The fire in the room burned brighter, the luscious smells from the surrounding tables were more potent, the silverware gleamed more brilliantly. 

She was aware of everything around her and especially the big man sitting across the table from her, watching her closely. 

There was no mistaking the masculine interest radiating off Ren. She'd been it enough in men, thought not very often lately, to be able to tell the truth. It seemed that lately she'd been living in a totally sex-free zone. But right now, in Emilio's restaurant, sex was in the air and....she was up for it. Completely. Rey's heart skipped a beat at the very thought.

Wow! She was up for sex with this man. Right _now_. She'd never done anything like this in her life. She never even wanted to. It took her a while before she felt ready to go to bed with a man. Weeks, sometimes. But with a clarity that astounded her, she knew that she was going to sleep with his man. Soon. Maybe even _tonight._

 _Oh yeah._ Instead of going to bed with a hot water bottle and latest hot male celebrity on her laptop, she just might be going to bed with this sexy, totally hot man she'd only just met this morning.

Her thigh muscles clenched at the very thought. It was both scary and exhilarating at the same time. Her head then instantly went into caution mode, listing all of the reasons why she shouldn't do this. She didn't even know him. He could have a disease---though, frankly, with the way he looked, not even her anxious subconscious took that one seriously.

He radiated perfect health and strength. Or.....he could be some crazy serial killer. They could find her body in a lake of blood and no clues. They'd interview Emilio and he'd say _he looked dine to me. We had no idea that he was a monster._ Or--or he could be into something really kinky, something she'd hate, like handcuffs or spanking like that Fifty Shades guy. _Ew!_

Luckily, her body wasn't paying her anxious, neurotic mind any attention at all. It didn't really have to be because any possible danger was all in her head.

Her body wasn't picking up on any vibes of serial killerness or kinkiness. All it perceived was a gorgeous, healthy male with a rather healthy sexual interest in her, which she was feeling right back. Oh yeah---she was _definitely_ feeling it, all right. She held her glass up and saw that her hand was trembling.

The blood-red liquid rippled against the sides of the glinting crystal glass. He was watching. He saw everything. Those deep dark eyes were perceptive. Her was looking at her as if he could walk around inside her mind. So he could see her hand trembling and would notice the flush she could feel rising from her breasts. She had to work to bring her breathing pattern back down to normal. This was a little scary.

Rey was a reader, and like most readers, she lived mainly inside of her own head. She was more comfortable on the sidelines of live, observing. Consequently, she was used to studying people without being studied herself. It was disconcerting to think that he was reading her own desires.

That he could actually read....her. Put it back on a light, impersonal footing.

"Well then, I propose another toast of my own." Again, their glasses clinked, with a clear ring of crystal. "To.....to Kylo Ren."

_And may he stay awhile in Jakku's Ridge.....for you, Rey Kenobi. Just you._

* * *

Poe Dameron held up a bottle of Coke and wished with all his heart that it was a beer. But this was a job, and alcohol and work didn't mix, to his dismay. A beer sounded great right about now, to wash down the taste of frustration out of his mouth. To an _impossible_ job. He held the Coke bottle up long enough to make the silent toast, then chugged the remainder of it's contents down.

He'd been holed up with Ben Solo aka Iceman, and their partner, Jannah in a surveillance van for the past week now and inside of the van looked and smelled it. 

Stale pizza crust lay in boxes piled on top of takeout cartons and empty ramen noodle containers, and the stench of unwashed male permeated the closed the space. It was goddamn cold, too, since turning on the engine heat too often would leave a telltale plume of exhaust. The surveillance van was panted a mottled green that blended well with the pine trees surrounding them.

They were about a mile away from Armitage Hux's mansion, high up in the hills, with a direct line of sight that allowed laser microwave beam to pick up vibrations off the French windows of Hux's study and digitally transform them into sound. There were taps on the phones, but Hux used the landline sparingly these days.

Iceman "Solo" had wanted ten dishes in an array around the mansion. He'd pounded desks, which usually worked---a Delta operator was like a lion in the geeky Tech section of the Unit---but this time the brass stood firm. One listening device. Lando down in Tech said it was the best way to keep surveillance from a safe distance. Anything Hux said in his study could be heard. 

They heard all conversations Hux had in his study and landline conversations. Nothing specific had been said just yet, but according to Jannah, something was brewing. There had been some chatter, a lot of chatter in the past months.

The NSA had intercepted a message between two tangos in Islamabad about "the Russian in Vermont." A mole in a Mafiya network in Bulgaria operated by Hux's organization had said something big was in the pipeline. But it was all bits and pieces with no smoking gun. Jannah was their best analyst and could speak Russian, Gregorian, Bulgarian, Polish, and Ukrainian.

She'd been sitting with heavy earphones on for over a week, listening to Hux and his staff basically pick the lint out of their bellybuttons. And of course, listening to classical music. There were probably three thousand people of Russian extraction in Vermont, but only one _Russian._ The big man himself.

Armitage Hux wasn’t the grand old man like Palpatine, or the man of literature everyone thought he was, but rather the head of the Russian Mafia in America, come straighten out the assorted and disorganized scumbags in Brighton Beach, making mere millions off had tax fraud and girls when there were billions to be made off counterfeit medicines and organ transplants and arms, the bigger the better. 

Poe Dameron almost choked on the mouthful of stale nachos as sounds came from his partner's headset. Something was going down. At last! Finally, no more waiting around! 

“What? What did he say?” Poe rounded on Jannah and fight back the urge to grab the her grubby sweatshirt and shake the words right out of her. 

Slowly, deliberately, Jannah lifted one earphone away from her ear. The other she kept covered with the foam rubber earpiece. Jannah had been offered earbuds and even a sleek, pricey Bang & Olufsen headset that conducted sound through the ear bone, but she’d refused them all. She wanted to be able to hear everything, she said, and did that she needed the big old-fashioned foam rubber pads that covered her ears. 

They couldn’t operate the laser beam at night. The light beam became visible in the dark. But from first light to last, Jannah was on duty, eating and drinking and pissing and cramping with at least one ear covered at all times, listening in.

This was what the Unit was all about—a secret government agency tasked with studying and international organized crime, bringing together military operatives and law enforcement officers to combat this unholy alliance. 

Jannah blinked as if coming out of a trance. “Not much. He picked up the phone and said hello, listened, and then excellent, then listened some more, then said have a safe journey, my friend. That’s all I heard him say.”

Poe’s mind raced. “Okay, okay. He’s happy about something. He’s happy about something that’s moving. Or rather someone that’s moving.” Poe closed his eyes at the thought of all the bad people who could be moving around. “So now all we have to do is find out what it is that he’s so happy about, if it’s coming here and when.” 

Jannah, who was a 36-level Doom player, grinned and miffed her can of Diet Coke, sipping it carefully. “Piece of fucking cake, Dameron.” 

* * *

To Kylo Ren.

Kylo lifted his glass and drank to himself. Or rather to Kylo Ren, jolly retired stockbroker, nonexistent though he might be. Ren had a pretty good deal, sitting here in this elegant restaurant across the table from one of the prettiest women he'd ever seen in his life. It sure as hell beat his last undercover job, as Evan Miller, former PIRA fighter who was hiring himself out of the highest bidder as an enforcer after peace broke out in Belfast.

Ben did a very incredible Northern Irish accent--it was probably in his DNA---even if Guillermo Gonzalez couldn't tell the difference between and Irishman and Frenchmen. As far as Gonzalez was concerned, Ben was one more corrupt gringo he paid to break legs and deliver packages.

Ben had spent twelve very long months rising through the ranks in Gonzalez's organizations, step by step. Living and breathing and acting the part of a scumbag. He'd even had to fuck Mara-Jade, Gonzalez's sister. Christ, that one had been hard. Not because she was ugly by any means---no, Mara-Jade was quite the looker.

Worked at it, too. She spent more time than the education budget of some third world countries on clothes, jewelry and cosmetic surgery.

The instant she laid eyes on him, she'd staked her claim. Guillermo found the whole thing funny. He'd once walked in on Mara-Jade giving a man head and had stayed and watched, critiquing her style. Ben had had more sex in that twelve-month period than a teen pop star and every second of it had been sheer, unaltered vomit-inducing hell. Mara-Jade was heavily into pain---her pain, not his, thank God.

He drew the line at that. Still, _her_ pain had been bad enough. She was into bondage and whips, with a hellish rang of sex toys and sex paraphernalia she kept in a big red chest by her bed. She like sex so rough he sometimes spent the rest of the night driving the porcelain bus when he finally crawled back into his small, spare bedroom.

Ben never got used to it, never found that it got easier. When he fucked her hard, knowing he was hurting her, her face got red, her green eyes glossy, grunting then screaming while she came, urging him to hurt her even more.

It had been the hardest thing he'd ever done in a hard lifetime. He'd seen quite enough pain during his childhood.

Stopping people from hurting others was what he was all about. Being forced to hurt a woman made his gut clench. It turned him inside out. He was seriously contemplating quitting when all of a sudden, in a furry of activity, Gonzalez, put together a guns-for-cocaine deal that was the biggest Ben had ever seen.

Two tones of cocaine for enough firepower to keep an African civil war going on for years, which had been the point. They had a system in place for Ben to get the word out and Gonzalez had down in the raid, caught in a crossfire so viscous the only thing left of him on the warehouse flor had been human hamburger. The cocaine had gone into a warehouse instead of up yuppie noses, the arsenal had been destroyed, and fifty-seven people slapped in jail.

Enough work to keep an army of DAs busy for the next ten years. Not bad for his first mission in the Unit in terms of results. It had been hell, though.

The mission had lasted a little over a year, but it felt more like a century. This mission a better mission. Way better. The waiter rolled a cart to their table and started plating the food. It smelled otherworldly. Kylo took in a deep sniff and Rey smiled at him.

"You're in for a real treat."

"Smells like it."

He waited until she picked up her fork, then dug into what looked like a plump ravioli that menu called a fagottino. When he brought the fork to his mouth, he nearly moaned. Cream, mushroom and truffle shavings in featherlight pasta. Good God! Rey had her eyes closed, too, chewing delicately. She'd chosen a mushroom risotto. Rey had the daintiest manners he'd ever seen.

She enjoyed her food and didn't treat it as if it were radioactive like other women did. But though her pleasure was visible, ever movement ws delicate.

Kylo watched her smooth, slim white throat work as she swallowed and swallowed heavily himself. He caught himself watching her next bite avidly. His eyes were riveted on her fork at the times speared the morsel of mushroom and followed it ever inch of the way into her wading mouth. That lovely, delectable, soft pink mouth.

He flashed suddenly on a vision of Rey opening that pretty mouth of hers over his cock. It was a disturbingly intense vision and very, _very_ detailed. He could see it, as clearly as if it were happening right now. Right in front of his own eyes.

They were naked, stretched out on a carpet in front a huge fire, exactly like the one in the big dining room. Kylo now Ben was stretched out on his back and Rey was bent over him, the smooth shiny bell of her dark hair tickling his thighs, watching him out of her witchy, upturned light cat's eyes. That soft mouth of hers opened. He could feel the heat of her breath against his sensitized skin of his cock. She licked him once and....

 _Goddamn! What the hell am I doing?!_ Ben shook himself out of his fantasy---a fantasy so lush and enticing his cock had twitched in his pants, hard.

 _Jesus Christ!_ Of all the places and times.....getting a woody in a fancy restaurant while dining with a woman he needed to pump for information. And _fuck._ The instant his mind thought of the word _pump_ , his head was instantly filled with yet another vision. This time it was a picture of Rey stretched out under him while he pumped in and out of her. 

It was like he was on the ceiling, looking down....watching. He saw everything. Her slim thighs twined around his hips, slender arms around his neck, his butt working as he moved in and out of her....

He swelled fully erect. Right there, in Emilio's elegant dining room, in the middle of at least fifty other patrons happily eating and drinking, unknowing that there was a woody in the room. How fucking lame was that? Luckily, his lap was covered by the peach linen tablecloth, but he didn't dare move. 

If he'd had on his usual stiff blue-jeans, maybe he could have hidden it, but he had on very expensive lightweight pure virgin wool pants that outlined him completely. If someone yelled _fire!_ he was a dead man. This was unheard of. His cock obeyed him at all times.

When he said _go_ , it went. When he _stop_ , it stopped. When he said _down_ , it went down and it stayed down.

And Christ, he wasn't hurting for sex. True, he hadn't had a woman in a couple of weeks, except for one girl who'd picked him up in a bar the night after the takedown, when he was still pumped full of adrenaline. Four whiskeys and he was more than ready for the brunette who'd sidled up to him and told him exactly what she wanted. Waking up next to her had been depressing, though, particularly since he couldn't even remember her name.

All the sex he'd had in the past year had been depressing, come to think of it. Sex with Mara-Jade had been creepier than hell and with what's-her-name had been completely unsatisfactory, like being given wax food when you're hungry.

Sex with Mara-Jade had felt like one of those sexual preservations in one of those psychiatric manuals, like fucking dead people or something. It took a lot to put Ben off of sex, but Mara-Jade had done it. 

The very memory of sex with her made him nauseous and sick to his stomach. However, the thought of sex with Rey Kenobi, now that was something else entirely. Another activity altogether and once he wanted to investigate. Everything about Rey was delightful--her skin, her voice, her manner, even her smell. Feminine and elegant. Totally enticing.

No wonder his dick was standing full to attention, like a diving rod that had finally found a cool, fresh spring after panning over mud flats for a year.


	5. Chapter 5

"You're staring," Rey says dryly.

He met those amazing eyes---like looking directly into a pale summer sky at noon. 

"Why, yes, I am," he confessed unabashedly. "But hey, that's what men do---we stare at pretty women. It's what makes us different from, say, trees."

She couldn't help but smile. Rey didn't seem to have the coy gene that most beautiful women were born with. She didn't simper, she didn't flutter her eyelashes---though they were long enough that she probably could blow candles at twenty paces just by batting her eyes---she didn't breathe deeply to showcase her breasts. Kylo aka Ben Solo had been on the receiving end of ever single one of those ploys and could literally write the script for it.

Rey simply kept on eating serenely. Kylo had to get his head out of his ass and start pumping--- _no, don't think of that word, Solo_ \---for intel.

There was a reason he was here, and it wasn't to stare into Rey Kenobi's beautiful eyes and fantasize about being inside her or even being romantically involved with her. And he sure has hell wasn't here to eat Emilio's delicious fagottini, thought there was a lucky fringe benefit, too.

By all rights, Ben should be with his partners in a freezing cold surveillance van, washing his socks and briefs out in a bucket of cold water, pissing in a jar, shitting in the woods, just like the damn bears do. The reason that he wasn't because he was acknowledged as being good with the ladies. And, of course, because he was also a really, _really_ good damn liar. Tough job, but someone's got to do it, right?

However, having all the blood rush down from his head straight to his blue steeler was definitely not good news. He needed that blood above his neck so he could pry the information out of her. Hard to do that with a hard-on that hurt like shit.

 _Think of Hux,_ he told himself. _Think what a scumbag that man is._

Armitage Hux. A man of letters, novelist, the last of the Russian intellectuals sent to the Gulag. The Soviet Union was dying, but like a scorpion that still has a sting in it's dying tail, it lashed, sweeping Hux away. It wasn't supposed to be like that.

The air had been full of perestroika and glasnost. Newspapers blossomed, the Berlin Wall came down. Intellectuals were the flavor of the month.

But something went wrong somewhere and Hux and his lover, Kira were sent to the place humanity forgot---Kolyma. The most notorious of Stalin's camps, where the prisoners were used as slave labor in the gold mines. Where so many died that the road to Kolyma was called the Road of Bones. Where it was said every ounce of gold mined cost a human life. It certainly had cost Kira's. 

Ben could almost feel sorry for the poor fuck, except for the fact that while in the prison camp he had joined Sheev Palpatine the _vory v zukone_ , or thieves-in-law. They were a criminal underclass sworn to take revenge on society. The _vory_ rejected everything about society---its morals, its laws, its affections---its own people.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the vory roared into power, an engine that had been idling in secret, waiting for the brakes to come off. Post-Soviet Russia was a giant that had been felled, its prone body ripe for gutting.

And gut it they did. The Russian Mafia had exploded. In a little over a decade and a half, it had become more powerful than the state. It owned factories and railroads and telcos and oil wells. It held the power of life and death over something like two-million Russian citizens. It signed contracts and treaties, with almost the dignity of a separate country.

Powerful Vors---Mafia dons---arose from within the ashes of the Soviet Union, the stuff of old legends. The thieves-in-law weren't talking, but Chechens and Azeris weren't sworn to secrecy, and lowly intel began to leak out.

The greatest Vo of all was a _kulturny chelovek_ \---a man of culture and a recently retired. He thus began looking for new blood, someone who possesses true leaderships skills, someone could lead the next generation of _zeks._ Hux had been just that _zek_ , and he had also survived the Gulag. His hands were useless, though, scarred beyond repair. There was only one possible man who fit that description from Ben's knowledge when asked to look into the case---Armitage Hux, a man revered inside Russia, a legend throughout the world. 

The writer whose Dry Your Tears in Moscow was considered one of the classic novels of the twentieth century. After all that happened in the Gulag, he never wrote another word for public consumption. Many speculated why this was so, but Ben already knew why.

The thieves-in-law sore they would never again toil at legal work. So Hux's legend only grew while he pulled the strings of an increasingly powerful Mafia network.

At his power, especially once handed to him by Palpatine, it expanded, so did the legend. His name was spoken only in whispers on street corners. He was insulated by layers and layers of lawyers and flunkies. Few knew his real identity. One of them had been a Russian former Special Forces operator Ben had worked trying to down Khan's nuclear network in Uzbekistan, Sergei Petov. 

Brother-in-arms. Straight-up guy who was handy with his GSh-18, was a good man to have at your back and who liked his vodka straight and a little too much. 

They'd been on a mission over in Waziristan, tracking down a possible Al Qaeda nests when Sergei stumbled onto a major drug operation that his personal contact in Peshawar said was run by the Russian Maifa. Sergei had snuffed around a little, was given Palpatine's name, which he then passed onto Ben. One more sniff, and it turned lethal. Forty-minutes after giving Ben the name over a cell phone, his throat had been lashed so deeply the knife had nicked Sergei's spinal column. 

His penis had been sliced off and stuffed in his mouth---the universal symbol of keeping your mouth shut. The memory of kneeling down in Sergei's blood helped get Ben's dick down. There are two ways to be a bad guy and both Palpatine and now Hux covered both.

You could do bad things to things or to people. Ben didn't really give a shit about crime against property, though Hux was in the hit list of top ten men doing damage to the world economy. After all, he had learned from the best of the best.

Thanks to him, the Russian economy was starved of cash, several banks had crashed, and a couple of third world economies had gone bankrupt while their presidents for life played with their dicks and with their money in Geneva. Bootleg scams, laundering billions, reselling stolen Mercedes---it was all bad stuff, sure, but Ben could live with it.

As far as Ben could tell from the file, Hux had gone into prison camp a writer and had come out of it....a monster. Over the past several years, he'd been personally responsible for death and misery on an unimageable scale. Twelve-year old innocent Moldavian girls kidnapped and sold into the sex trade, used brutally on an industrial basis and usually dead by the time they were twenty. 

Mountains of AK-47s put into the hands of Sierra Leonean child soldiers barely big enough to carry them. Cut heroin guaranteed to kill the poor sick fucks shooting up on the streets of a hundred cities.

Ben was going to take him down. Oh, yes. It was what he did for a living. What he lived for. He'd dedicated his life to taking down the bad guys and Hux was as bad as they come. Pit the road leading to the destruction of Hux ran right through this beautiful young woman sitting across the table, smiling brightly at him.

"So." He put his fork down and leaned forward slightly. He could feel the heat of the candle flame against his face. "Tell me, what do pretty girls do in Jakku's Ridge? What are the local attractions?"

Rey shook her head. It was physically impossible, but it felt as if her scent covered him when she moved, as if it were a fine, pearly powder. Head. Out. Of. Ass. Solo! _Now!_

"First thing's first, Ren, Jakku's Ridge isn't Manhattan." she said, with a gentle smile. "The pleasures here are more provincial than you are perhaps used to. Still, we do have some attractions. And there's always Armitage Hux's musical soirees. He manages to attract world-class musicians to our little corner of the world."

Not by a flicker of his eye lashes did Ben betray any emotion. He furrowed his brow, clueless businessman trying to place a name he knew he shouldn't know, but didn't. 

"Hux," he said, frowning. "Isn't he that Russian....Russian what? Musician? Dancer?"

"He's a writer." Rey laughed. "A Russian writer, actually. A very great writer in fact, the author of Dry Your Tears in Moscow, one of the great masterpieces of twentieth-century literature. Each year he is nominated for the Nobel Prize of Literature. And he would undoubtedly have won if he had continued writing, but he never did. He was one of the last of the dissents sent to a Soviet prison camp. After he was released, he never wrote another word, at least to the public."

Her face and voice had turned serious. She looked down at the tablecloth, tracing a pattern with a pink-tipped fingernail. She looked up at him, gemlike eyes gleaming with emotion.

"And he won't talk about it, either. He's a wonderful man and we've become friends since he's moved here. As a matter of fact, he's having a musical soiree this Thursday evening."

Oh God. Ben felt his heart nearly stop in his chest. They were friends. What the hell did that mean? Was she _fucking_ him? It was bad enough that she'd spend next Thursday in Scumbag Central, without him having the image of Rey spending time under Hux, those slender legs wrapped around the fuck-head's hips.....

This was bad shit. He didn't even want to think about it. This was worse than Mara-Jade's chest of sex toys, way worse.

Ben looked at her carefully. She met his eyes, her gaze calm and serene. He relaxed. If she'd been Hux's lover, she'd have shown some sign. A little blush, evading his gaze, his smile. Something. But there was nothing. So, she wasn't fucking the bastard. Good. Not that he cared. Much.

_Jesus. Oh, shit._

* * *

The short hairs on the back of Ben's neck stood up. He'd just been handed an opening---a honest to God opening wide enough to drive a Humvee through---to insinuate himself into Hux's house, as Rey's guest. It was a goddamn huge window of opportunity, it was why he was here and not in the smelly surveillance van and the first thing that flashed through his mind wasn't: _how do I wangle an invitation into Hux's house_ but _is Rey fucking the guy?_

He'd been completely sidetracked from the mission. _Pow!_ It had been punched right out of his head. Being sidetracked went against every single ounce of training he'd ever had, not to mention it being an excellent way to get himself killed.

Undercover work is like proctology. You poke and prod around assholes, looking for something bad, and then you zap the bad things you find. His line of work required utter concentration, day and night. If Kylo Ren made a big mistake, he lost money. Ben Solo paid for his mistakes in blood.

"I haven't read anything by him, sorry. How long has this guy---what's his name? Hux?"

Rey nodded.

"How long has this guy Hux lived here in Jakku's Ridge? It seems a little strange place for a Russian exile to settle down in."

"Well, maybe not so strange. I'm told upstate Vermont is much like the area around Moscow, only our beech trees have larger leaves on them. And Hux isn't a Russian exile. He got out of prison camp more or less in the same period that the Soviet Union fell. In Moscow, he was greeted like a king when he was released. I remember it still. I'd just read Dry Your Tears in Moscow and I followed what happened to him in the newspapers."

Ben did some fast calculating. "Good God, you must have been---"

"I was twelve." She shrugged, more of that fairy dust coming his way. "A very precocious twelve year old. And.....that summer I had....a lot of time to read."

Damn straight. In the summer of 1993, when Hux was released to return like a conquering hero to Moscow, Rey Kenobi had been in the hospital. Her father had thrown her out of a third-story hotel window in a desperate attempt to save her life during a hotel fire. The two Kenobi's, man and wife, perished, and Rey suffered a T12 fracture. She'd had three operations and spent that summer and most of the winter in a fully body cast.

Ben waited for her to tell her story, but she didn't. Most interesting. In Ben's experience, people who have been through trauma are almost always eager to talk about it. 

It was like a badge of honor--- _look what I went through, look at what I survived._

Rey's story was particularly dramatic. Fire started by a disgruntled employee breaking out on the fifth floor of the five-star hotel in Boston where she was staying with her parents. Her father wrapping her up in blankets and showing her off the balcony in a desperate attempt to save her, then rushing back into the room to try and save his wife.

It took two days for the room to cool down enough to collect the charred bones for a funeral. Rey never got to attend the funeral. By that time, she'd already had two operations and was sedated.

Why wasn't she telling him about it? But she wasn't, and she wasn't uncomfortable with silence, either, like most women were. She sipped her wine and watched him calmly.

Ben finally broke the silence. "So, he leaves Russia and moves to the States? Why? I mean the Soviet system fell, after all. Why didn't he just stay? Particularly since apparently he was a big shot there."

This was complete bullshit. Ben knew exactly why Hux was here and he was looking at it right now. Rey Kenobi. A dead ringer for a woman long since dead, Hux's lover, Kira Petrova, who had perished in the labor camp. Ben had seen the photos of Petrova and the resemblance to Rey was uncanny.

A normal man wouldn't ever expect that a woman who merely looked like the woman he'd once loved could be her, but Hux had gone well beyond normal years ago. 

She was silent another moment, then rested her chin on her fist. "I don't really know why Hux moved here. He's never actually talked about it to me before. I just assumed he wanted a clean slate and immigrated here to wipe out the rest."

Well, to set up a criminal empire here, too. There _was_ that.

"Actually, we don't really talk about these things," she continued in her soft voice. "Mainly we just talk about books. Hux has a great mind. It's a privilege to spend time in his presence."

 _Fuck-head_ , Ben thought sourly, then caught himself again, appalled. The secret to undercover work is to stay in character, even inside your own head. _Especially_ inside your own head.

He'd been carrying on an internal monologue all this time and if he'd been chatting with someone a little less harmless than Rey Kenobi---with, say, Guillermo Gonzalez, who'd shoot a hole in anyone's head at least the suspicion that someone was double-crossing him, blow your kneecap out of the hell of it and your elbow off for target practice---then he'd have been a goner. This _never_ happened. Ever.

Ben was as focused as the laser beam that every morning was aimed at the window of Hux's study. As a soldier and now as a member of the Unit. He had to get his head out of his ass and pretend he was dead from the belt buckle down from now on. Rey turned her head to the big picture windows. Snow had started gently falling, dusting the big spot lit evergreens in the sloping lawn outside the restaurant, a scene straight out of a Christmas card.

She sighed and pushed away her half-eaten tiramisu. She dabbed at her mouth with the linen napkin and placed it neatly on the side. She needn't have bothered wiping her mouth. Ben couldn't even imagine her being sloppy with her food.

Her moves were all so graceful, just watching her was a pleasure. Head. Out. Of. Ass. Solo. If he kept repeating it enough to himself often enough, it finally might just happen.

"Kylo."

His head snapped up. She'd pushed back from the table, body language clear. Oh God, he hadn't pumped her at all, for enough intel on Hux. Again, at the word _pump_ , his cock leaped in his pants. Jesus. I need to get control of this...now. He let his hand drop to his lap, wondering whether he should surreptitiously pinch himself. Maybe if he hurt himself enough, it'd do down.

"Yeah?"

She slowly smiled at him. "It's starting to snow. I don't have snow tires, so I really should get to my car before the streets become slick."

A drop of sweat ran down his back. He didn't want the evening to end. Of course, he hadn't gotten as much as he wanted, but he also....didn't want the evening to end. This was the nicest evening that he'd spend in.... _shit._ Well, since before the Gonzalez job, which had lasted over a year. And before that had been his tour in Afghanistan. We were talking years, here.

He relaxed his face. "I'll drive you home myself, don't worry about it. And I have snow tires and they're brand new. We can still have coffee. Or would you like a brandy?"

Her eyes were so clear, it was like looking into limpid pools of water. That pale pink mouth tilted up. "That's very nice of you to offer, but I'll need my car tomorrow morning. So if you'll just drive me back to the library, that'll be fine."

 _With bad tires_? Ben balked. No fucking way. But that pretty, pointed little chin looked just a little stubborn so he couldn't say, _Hell no, I'm not letting you drive home in lousy weather with the wrong damn tires._ As much as he'd like to. He glanced out the window himself. The snow was falling more thickly now. He then turned back to her.

"I tell you what. I really like my java after a good meal. Offer me a cup at your house and I'll not only drive you home, but I'll stop by in the morning, pick you up, and drive you back to the library."

She blinked. A moment of uncertainty etched across her face. Ben was really good at finding even small chinks to make people do whatever the hell he wanted them to. It was a gift and he'd had it forever.

He slowly leaned forward. "Please, Rey," he said softly. "I really can't stand the thought of you driving home alone in the dark in bad weather with the wrong tires. My mom drummed that sort of thing into my head when I was a kid that she'd turn over in her grave if she knew that I'd let you do it. And I'd just drive right behind you anyways to make sure that you got home safely, anyways, so you'd be doing me a big favor if you'd just let me drive you home."

Rey gave a half smile. "Well, if you put it that way, I guess...."

"I do. And you just tell me when you want me to come pick you up and I'll drive you to the library to get your car tomorrow, and I'll be there."

She just shook her head, the soft dark bell of her hair swinging and sending some shampoo scent full of pheromones his way. "Don't you have better things to do tomorrow, Ren?"

He looked her straight in the eyes. "Not important things," he said softly. "Not as important as this anyway."

It was his first overt move. His meaning couldn't have been clearer if he'd written it in the Day-Go letters on the wall. _I'm putting the moves on you._ To her credit, Rey didn't simper or blush or look away. She just watched his eyes for a long moment, then finally spoke in a soft voice.

"Okay."

_Fucking A!_


	6. Chapter 6

_I'm going to sleep with this man_ , Rey thought in bemusement. This beautiful New York businessman, this Kylo Ren, whom she'd only met for the first time today---she was going to go to bed with him. And not just in some vague moment in the future, after thinking about it endlessly, turning various scenarios over and over inside her mind, the way she usually did, but _tonight._ Maybe. Probably.

Not only had she never done anything like this in her life, she'd never even thought herself capable of it. Her roommate in college had said that she was incredibly picky, and she was.

It sometimes took her weeks to decide on whether she wanted to go to bed with someone, and if the man lost interest beforehand, too fucking bad. Her last affair had been in college, after only two months of dating, and it hadn't been anything memorable. in fact, she couldn't even remember his face or even his name. Mickey. Micky.... _something._

It had been just before she was supposed to leave for Paris. A few days later, a distraught Uncle Cassian had called to say that her Aunt Jyn was ill, Rey had rushed back to Jakku's Ridge, and that been that.

The new boyfriend---Micky Whosit---had vanished into the ether, along with her trip to Paris. Her job, her aunt and uncle...…since then, there hadn't been time or energy for much more than that. Certainly not for love affairs. Slowly, so slowly she hadn't noticed it happening, the world had closed in on her.

The dull, gray world....consuming her whole.

It wasn't dully or gray now. She felt as if she'd been shocked by a jolt of electricity that had awakened all of her senses. Her skin was so sensitized that she could feel the movements in the air when Ben moved his hands, when the waiter walked by.

She was aware of every item of clothing she had on. She was aware of her lace panties biting slightly into her hips, the feel of her thigh-highs, her bra rubbing against her sensitive nipples. When he looked at her, it was as if he touched her with his hands. Those big, rough, well-manicured hands so at odds with his profession. The world was saturated with color. The flames from the huge fire in the dining room painted the left side of Ben's face a dusky rose color.

His hair black gleamed a shiny ebony, he eyes were such a searing soft brown. He had the most beautiful male mouth she'd ever seen. Firm, mobile, a rich-rosy red. Redder, after he started flirting with her. It had been fascinating, watching him watching her.

There was no doubt in her mind that she had turned him on. The caramelized fire in his eyes as he looked at her was like a punch to the stomach. What had been amazing was that she felt the desire right _back._ It was then that Rey realized that she'd been living in a little glass bell of sadness, in a world leached of color and desire.

They were at the door. Somehow, between getting her coat for her and helping her into it, he must have paid the check, because they just walked right out of Da Emilio's to the snowy parking lot. Ben stopped just under the eaves and looked down at her, frowning. "They wouldn't let me pay for the dinner." he said, in an annoyed tone.

She sighed. "I thought something like that might happen. They never let me pay, either. And so of course I try not to come too often. Pity, because the food is so very good."

He reached out a big hand and stroked her cheek with the back of his forefinger. "I think you've bewitched them." he said, that deep voice suddenly soft. "I understand completely."

"No." Rey fought against the urge to rub her cheek against his hand, much as Aunt Jyn's cat Folly did when someone scratched her head. "I think it's more a question of adoption than rather enchantment."

An errant snowflake fell on her cheek and she looked up. Big fat lazy flakes were drifting out of the inky night sky, seeming to come from nowhere. She lifted her face into the night and breathed deeply, completely and utterly content. Ben seemed to shake himself. He looked up at the sky and back and her and tugged his scarf off.

"Here." Before she could protest, he'd wrapped it around her neck twice. "It's turning chilly. And as pretty as that coat is, it doesn't look quite warm enough."

The scarf was a deep midnight blue, very soft. Cashmere, triple ply. It still carried his body heat and the scent of him---a primal scent, male musk and pine, with a faint overlay of citrus.

"There." He knotted tightly, patted it, and stepped back, pleased with his work. "That's better."

Actually, it was. She'd felt the chill but hadn't been dressed warmly, though. "Thank you, Ren, but now you're going to be cold," she protested.

He just looked at her, but it was a look that spoke volumes. It was the kind of look men didn't give women anymore. She recognized it as the look at her father had given her mother when she tried to lift something heavy and he rushed to take it out of her hands. It was the look only a certain kind of man could give to a woman and she hadn't seen it in a long, long time.

A totally politically incorrect look, sexy as hell. Ben had almost ridiculously old-fashioned manners. He walked her to the passenger door, handed her in as if she were indeed the queen of Jakku's Ridge---maybe she should just by herself a tiara and be done with it---buckled her belt for her, then got in himself. She gave him quiet directions and they pulled out, that outrageously beautiful and powerful car doing something like thirty miles an hour. Though Rey's heart drummed, her hands were steady, folded in her lap.

Anticipation zinged through her system, though. She couldn't remember feeling so alive. Or so incredibly female. Ben had barely touched her, and yet, it was as if they'd already had engaged in foreplay.

Her breasts were so sensitized, she could feel the lace cups of her bra every time that she breathed. When the car took corners, she could feel the pressure between her legs. It was entirely possible that she was already wet. If the evening ended up with sex, she'd be thrilled. If not, she was still thrilled. 

It had been so long since she'd felt _anything_ like this. Soft, female. So utterly alive.

They were gliding slowly through a heavily wooded area on their way back into town, the light snowflakes drifting down gently, two horizonal columns of gentle snowfall lit the powerful headlights. The landscape looked enchanted, timeless. They could have been a prince and a princess in a horse-drawn carriage a hundred years ago.

Rey smiled at the thoughts inside her head, so unlike the background hum of worry and duty that was in it's usual fare. She turned her slowly to look at Ben, at his clean, strong profile outlined in the dim lights of the dashboard. What ever happened between them tonight, she owed him thanks for the gift of this evening. At his glance, she smiled at him.

He didn't say anything. The silence inside of the car was unbroken. She liked it that he didn't feel the need to chat. There was something in the air and words, the wrong words, could kill the magic.

Ben reached out and took her hand, bringing it to his mouth and pressing a kiss in the palm. She was so excited, she'd forgotten to put on her gloves. His breath was hot, like steam, and she felt that little kiss down into her bones. He returned her hand to her lap. She curled her hand around the kiss and waited, heart pounding away in her chest, for what life would throw her way next. It was like being encased in a bubble.

Something big, something wonderful was about happen and this was the moment just before it. The very air was charged with anticipation. Even the weather cooperated, knowing that it was a very special night.

Rey hated bad weather bit this wasn't bad---it was enchanted. Big fat flakes drifting out of the sky, gently settling on the ground, forming a thin blanket. Visibility wasn't good, but it didn't seem to matter as he big car purred slowly down the street. It was like being inside a snow globe, cut off from the rest of the world.

Without Rey having to give any further directions, Ben somehow made his way unerringly to her door. The car glided up her driveway and Ben killed the engine.

The street lamp ten feet away gave just enough light for her to make out his expression as he turned to her, one big arm draped over the steering wheel. He wasn't smiling, trying to charm his way into her pants. His face was drawn, the skin tight over his cheekbones, eyes intense even in the darkness of the car.

"So," he said, his voice low. "How about that cup of coffee you promised me."

She waited a beat because her heart was pounding and her throat felt tight. She opened her mouth, but found that no words came out. Nothing at all. Even if she had words, she couldn't find the breath to say them. Excitement had lit a ball of fire inside her chest, making it nearly impossible for her to even speak. So, she nodded instead. In a second, he was at the passenger door, lifting her out with a strong hand.

They stood for a moment outside the car. Ben must have pushed the key fob because behind her, all the doors of the Lexus locked wit a quiet, expensive-sounding _whump-whump._ So unlike the tinny sound her own car made.

He was standing so close to her, she had to tilt her head back to watch his eyes watching hers. Big puffy snowflakes touched her skin like cold little kisses, but she was so hot that they melt away immediately. There was an unnatural hush, as if the entire world were waiting for the to take a leap into the unknown. She lived on a quiet street, it was true, but there were no noises whatsoever. They could have been the last man and woman on earth.

He bent down, slowly. So slowly that she could have protested or turned her head away if she wanted. The idea never even crossed her mind.

If anything, Rey lifted herself a little on the balls of her feet, to meet him halfway. Ben kept his hands by his side, so did she, too, though she had to curl her fingers into her palms to keep from reaching out for him.

It seemed as if she'd wanted to touch him all evening, touch that un-businessman-like body of that was hidden underneath the staid business suit.

* * *

Their lips met, clung. Rey opened her mouth to him, not even thinking twice about it. Her mouth just opened as her eyes drifted shut. She didn't want anything to distract herself from the feel of his mouth on hers, hot and soft at the same time.

When his tongue touched hers---just a quick stroke---she felt it down to her toes. She especially felt it between her legs. Oh my God.

A gentle kiss, they weren't touching anywhere except their mouths, and Rey was as turned on as she'd ever been in her life. Ben turned his head to get a bigger draft of her. She was on her tiptoes now and she stumbled. Or would have if he hadn't immediately put his arms around her, pulling her hard up against him, upsetting her balance.

But she didn't fall. Before she even had time to realize it, her world titled and he was bridal carrying her.

"Don't want those pretty boots of yours to get ruined," he whispered against her mouth, and started walking.

The romance of it all touched her heart. She didn't protect, she didn't wriggle or even squeal. It was too luscious, this airborne feeling. She'd read far too many books, and probably way too many romances, she knew that. So it wasn't surprising that in her head, this nice New York businessman had a staid librarian from a small town in Vermont morphed into a knight carrying his lady-love to their bower.

He carried her easily, as if she weighed nothing, which told her he was as strong as he seemed. He didn't look though the ground was slippery and icy. He didn't even look forward, up the path to her front door. His eyes were locked with hers, gaze so intent it was as if he were pulling where he needed to go from inside her head.

It was all so magical, so bright and fresh. Magic didn't exist in this world, Rey knew that. She knew perfectly well what she was getting herself into.

This was probably a one-night stand. A two-night stand, maybe, if she got super lucky. It was the beginning of the weekend, after all. But when the weekend was over, Kylo Ren would get into his brand-new shiny black Lexus and head on out to greener pastures, meaning more or less anywhere other than Jakku's Ridge, which didn't have much to recommend to a sophisticated New Yorker.

So Rey was determined to wrest every ounce of magical pleasure from the night. She concentrated on all her senses, on this particular moment, which might never come again. The feel of him, the heat of him, even the smell of him. It was all so incredibly enticing, his arms more comfortable than the softest bed. Without even thinking about it, she lay her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes for a moment to concentrate on her growing feelings. Her cheek lay against the softness of his cashmere coat. When she opened her eyes, she could see where his beard started.

The line of his jaw was so severe it was almost at right angles and his cheekbones were sharp. As a matter of fact, the only soft thing about him was his overcoat.

She rubbed her cheek against it, feeling rock-hard muscle right underneath the material. Rock hard muscle underneath her hands, too, bunching and releasing as he carried her up the icy walkway, as casually as if strolling under the warm summer sun. No change in his breathing, though he was carrying an adult woman, as easily as if she were a child.

He looked down at her. She'd been studying him and she didn't even make any attempts to hide it. When she glanced down, she smiled, feeling the heat rising in her soft pale, cheeks.

"Do you have a key handy?" he asked quietly.

She did. In a special pocket inside her purse. He took it, then walked up the four steps onto her porch. Bending with her still in his arms, he opened the front door and carried her over the threshold. It might be the only time in her life a man had carried her over the threshold and Rey wanted to commit to memory.

Everything about it. She greedily soaked up every single sensation, all her senses alive and firing, drinking in ever detail of the moment. The feel of him beneath her hands, strong and hard, covered with soft trappings of a businessman.

The wonderful smell of him, stronger now that she was so close. It was a huge temptation not to lick him, to see just what he tasted like. The open door behind her, visible over Ben's broad shoulder. It was like an old-fashioned panting, the yellow streetlight perfect centered in the open doorway, the door framing a snowy scene straight out of Currier & Ives. Snowflakes falling like featherlight stars out of the black night sky. Ben kicked the door closed behind him and slid her down his body.

There was no way on earth she could miss his erection, even through his pants and overcoat. She felt that hard, steely column, her stomach muscles contracted and she shivered.

A second later, his scarf and her coat lady on her hardwood floor and he cupped her head as he kissed her. Deeper kisses these, harder, longer. Luscious, never ending, electrying. Rey was standing slightly on tiptoe, holding his thick wrists when he left his head, those mesmerizing caramel eyes locked on to hers. His thin nostrils were slightly flared, his cheekbones were flushed red underneath his heavy pale skin.

His beautiful mouth was flushed and wet. Still, though he was definitely aroused---the erection pressed against her belly was vivid proof of that--he looked utterly in control of himself. Unlike her. Rey felt as if she were melting.

Inside she was buzzing, dizzy with hot molten desire, hardly able to catch her breath against the tight band around her chest. The only thing holding her upright was her hands around his wrists. Otherwise, she'd collapse in a puddle at his feet. Somewhere far away something was ringing, some kind of bell. Well, that fit.

A celebratory bell was a perfect soundtrack for what was going on inside her. It took her bedazzled brain almost a minute to realize that it was the telephone ringing. Her answering machine in the living room picked it up and she could heard her own voice asking whoever called to leave a message. Whoever it was, it couldn't have been anything really all that important, because there was a click and they hung up.

Thank God it wasn't her Uncle Cassian calling about yet another problem with Aunt Jyn. Rey liked to think that she would, could break the spell of this moment if her aunt and uncle needed her, but she was glad she wasn't being put to the test. Ben behaved as if he phone hadn't rung at all.

He was watching her intently, gaze focused on her face, searching for something. Whatever it wanted, it was his.

"Rey." he said, his deep voice low, then stopped.

There really wasn't anything else he had to say. What he wanted from her was clear. Every line of his big body was drawn in with desire. There was only one possible answer.

"Yes," she whispered.

* * *

Hux used his stylus to punch in Rey's number and listened, with growing apprehension, to the empty line and the far-off ringing, then her lovely voice asking him to leave her a message. He didn't want to leave a message, he wanted to talk to her. She wasn't home. Why wasn't she home? Where was she?

Rey seldom went out these days. He then figured she might be with her aunt and uncle, but she'd spent the evening before with them. And they were so elderly they ate at six and were both in bed by nine. It was now after ten.

Hux put down the phone with a frown, clawed hand hovering over the receiver. He daren't call her again. He had to ration his calls to Kira-- _Rey!_ He limited himself to no more tha two calls a week and rationed their ocassions out together. Two, three times a month, but no more. He didn't dare go beyond that. Not yet. But soon.

They'd already met tea this month and he'd casually dropped by the library tp bring her a package of pirozhki for. She wouldn't know that, of course. He'd said a friend had brought several boxes and too many sweets weren't good for his health. And then of course there was the soiree he was organizing on Thursday. His soiree was for her, only her. He loved music, but he had a very extensive CD collection and he could have himself driven down to New York or Boston anytime he wanted when he desired live music.

New York in particular proved very satisfactory that way. He kept an apartment on Park Avenue, owned by a corporation with ten shells around it. No one would ever know it belonged to him.

The apartment had been decorated in the pastel colors that Rey loved, filled with her favorite music CDs, stocked with her favorite teas. He'd even bought an entire wardrobe of designer clothing in her size, just waiting for her to step into them. Everything was ready. His new life was there, shimmering just beyond reach.

With each passing day, it's outlines few more and more solid, more sustainable. Soon _now_. Soon. Soon, she'd see, and understand. Soon, she would be his. 

He'd been waiting for this day, working hard towards this, since he'd first moved here five months ago. Rey was meant to be his, his Kira come back to life. This is what he'd been working for, without even realizing it, since December 12, 1989., when the KBG had come for them. It was a date carved into his heart with pure acid, never to be forgotten.

The day he ceased being human. They'd just finished making love, he and Kira. Once was never enough with her, he'd found, so as he lay next to her, his cock had been still half erect, still slick from her. The room smell heavily of her perfume and their sex. He wanted her, endlessly. 

They'd been lovers for a year, and he knew he could have her as much as he wanted, but they wanting was always still there. The first, frantic desire, where he'd bedded her as often as he could, for hours a day, had subsided a bit. Not because he desired her less, but because he already knew she was his. All he had to do was reach out a hand, and she was there.

Kira, his beautiful Kira, had been lying on her stomach, sated, rosy, smiling. He lay down next to her on his side. One hand propped up his head, the other lay in the small of her back. He was composing a poem in his head, an ode to woman, for it seemed to him in that one moment that Kira embodied every beautiful, desirable woman who had ever walked this earth. The smell of woman was in the air, and he knew generations of men had both lived and died for that smell, the smell of slick, hot love.

Idly, he began to compose, "Ode to Woman" a poem that had simply welled up inside him. The first poem in his life that had come to him perfect and complete and whole in one simple rush.

He had been touched by the gods that afternoon. The words had come, powerful and golden, in perfect cadences.

He didn't need to write them down; the words etched in his heart as they came to him. He beat out the rhythm of the poem with his forefinger, against the swell of Kira's perfect white buttock, like the beat of a song, the music of poetry against the skin of his woman.

She'd known what he was doing. Of course, Kira knew him, knew him down to his very soul. He wouldn't have been surprised if she'd been able to pluck the words from his own head. His finger tapped the cadences of the words on her soft skin, he'd just ended with poem, the best thing he'd ever written, when the harsh knock sounded at the door. 

He hadn't even been given the time to get up, put his clothes back on, armor himself with dignity. The KGB goons kicked his door down and, weapons drawn him away from a screaming Kira. _This is impossible,_ he thought frantically. _No! Russia has changed! The world has changed! The Berlin Wall has just come down!_ he screamed, before a rifle butt in the head felled him.

He shook his head, stunned. This wasn't happening, this couldn't be happening. Gorbachev had introduced glasnost, perestroika. Russia was, finally, opening. The long Stalinist nightmare was over. And anyway, Hux was no dissident. He was a apolitical. A writer. A writer of the New Russia, with no agenda other than creating great literature. He was lionized amongst the intelligentsia, a New Russian, a man freed from the shackles of the past.

But the men who broke down his door were throwbacks--brutal brutish men, coming out of the murky hallway like orcs out of a dark cave, out a darkness before time.

This was a mistake. He was Armitage Hux. Dry Your Tears in Moscow was a best-seller. One of his own short-stories had been made into a film that had won a Leone d'Oro in Venice. He'd been interviewed on TV, on a number of the brand-new channels that were opening Soviet society up. 

He hobnobbed with the new businessmen, with the media darlings. They'd named him a Chevalier de la Republique in France. He had to contact someone, get this cleared up, he thought, as the goons tossed him his pants, then dragged him bare chested, out into the hallway. And then his heart stopped, simply stopped, when the third officer went back into the house and dragged a screaming Kira out into the hallway. His gaze locked with hers.

The great Soviet scorpion was dying but it's poison-tipped tail still had the power to sweep lives away. He would be accused of anti-Soviet propaganda---such a joke when the Soviet Union was already falling apart.

Daily, pieces of it were breaking off, like floes off a huge iceberg, floating away on the tides of history itself. He would be accused and then sentenced to a prison camp, a certain death sentence. A long, lingering death sentence. There would be no getting out alive. _And now they had Kira. This was beyond his worse nightmare._

He thought being taken away by the KGB would be the worst thing that could happen to him. But he'd been wrong. Dead wrong. Screaming, raging, fighting every step of the way, desperate to shield Kira, he was dragged out of the building on Arbat Street and into a waiting ZI.

The twelfth of December, 1989. The day Armitage Hux died.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally, we're getting to the first sex scene out of many to come!

_Yes!_ Ben had known that the answer to his unasked question would be yes. Letting him come in for coffee was girl code for, _do you want to have sex with me?_ And the answer was _yes, he did. Hell yes!_ Ben thought of nothing else as he drove back to her house. She'd murmured directions, but he didn't need them. He'd driven so often to her house on his previous stakeouts, he could find his way here blindfolded.

And now that he'd spent an evening with Rey, he would probably find _her_ blindfolded, by smell alone. She had the most enchanting scent.

The whole car was filled with it. Some fresh spring like perfume mixed with shampoo and soap and warm woman. Unique, heady. In the car, her scent alone had been enough to make his cock sit straight up and take notice, not that it needed any stimulation. Good thing he had on his expensive cashmere overcoat. Ben was a good strategist. He set goals and figured out how to meet them with the tools at hand.

This was the staging phase, the one right before the battle. This was when his body started readying himself for combat. His senses heightened, his heart rate slowed, he saw and heard with unusual clarity. The next stage was crucial. He had to somehow convince her to trust him.

Taking a woman to bed was the best way to do that, he knew from long experience. So he should be moving things slowly around to getting into her pants.

Ben knew exactly how that was supposed to work. Walk her to her door, a light and gentle kiss before she opens it, just to break the ice, another kiss after she'd poured their nightcaps. Sitting on the couch, listening to the music she'd put on, idly chatting. Another kiss, then another, less light this time with a little tongue.....

Everything slowly, with style, giving her time to get used to him. He could do it. He'd done it before, countless times. 

He always kept his cool during sex. Hell, with Mara-Jade, he could have recited from memory whole chunks of the Army Field Manual while fucking, trying not to wince while Mara's razor-sharp claws dug into his back and buttocks. Keeping his cool before, during, and in the aftermath of sex was easy, he'd done it all his life. He needed that cool right now. This was a job. A pleasurable job, okay, and man, did he deserve it after the shit details he'd been on in Afghanistan and after a year in the employ of the Drug Lord from Hell and his sister, Cruella De Vil.

He had the moves, all shiny and polished from lots of use. He had the moves, the words, he had it all in his armamentarium. This should honestly be a snap.

Have sex, make sure she was pleasured, gain her confidence, seduce some intel on Hux out of her, gain and invite to the musical evening _Fuckhead_ was organizing.....that was the mission. He'd done harder things in his life, he could do this. Easy.

He stopped just inside the door, back against it, just for a second. His knees had turned weak when her tongue met his. It was crazy. Maybe it was the bottle of wine he'd polished off over dinner, though, he was known for being able to hold his liquor. He was part Irish, after all. 

So maybe it wasn't the wine, but her mouth. The very taste of her, spicy, sexy, with an overlay of the chocolate and cream desert. He lifted his mouth for a moment and looked down at her. Her hair spilled over the collar of his overcoat, lighter even still against the dark color. Her lips were red, slightly swollen, pale gem-like eyes wide, the pupils dilated.

A vein beat against her neck and wanted, violently, to feel that beat against her breast. She was watching him, taking cues from him, though the only kind of cue she could get right now was _how fast can I get you into bed?_ Should he be slowing this down? Her eyes fluttered shut and she lifted her mouth to his in a kiss that was all too short. Maybe he didn't have to slow this down. Which, all in all, was a good thing, because he didn't know if he could.

"Do you still want coffee?" she whispered finally, pulling back and searching his eyes.

Did he want coffee? Shit no, he didn't need coffee, he didn't need any stimulants. The way he was feeling right now, he needed someone to hose him do with cold water.

"No." he whispered back.

Christ, she was pretty. No, she wasn't just pretty. She was beautiful. Not many women were beautiful, magazine articles to the contrary. They gussied themselves up, and a lot of them that were secretly dogs wore so much makeup you will really couldn't tell what they looked like in there, under all the glop. And then of course there was the knife and the needle, giving half the women in America the same thing, upturned nose and big pillowy lips.

Rey had a natural beauty that didn't scream _look at me!_ in any way, and yet once you did, once you really _looked_ , it was almost impossible to tear your gaze away.

Her makeup was almost gone, but she didn't need it. That clear, porcelain skin that looked softer than anything human could possibly be, the big, tilted dark eyes, the delicate shape of her cheekbones and jawline---they were a magnet for the eyes, especially his for he could not stop staring at her.

"You're so fucking beautiful. Rey." he whispered, then winced. "Whoa! Sorry."

"Thanks," she whispered and laughed softly. "But why are we whispering?"

They were indeed whispering because it was a whispering moment. Actually, it was a magical moment. She felt so good in his arms. Everything about this felt good. The night, the woman.....

It was utterly silent, as if they were the only people left in a white world of snow and silence. She was smiling dreamily up at him, beautiful and welcoming. This was the best place he'd been in since---shit, since he didn't remember when. Ben leaned against the door with her in his arms. He leaned against it because it was there and because, crazily, his knees were buckling.

It wasn't Rey's weight. She was slender, even slight. He'd bet the farm she didn't eight more than one twenty, tops. He'd climbed a mountain in the Kush carting a ruck-sack weighting more than eight pounds, sixteen liters of water, and his XM8 with nine magazines, which weighted over twenty pounds, at least.

He hadn't done it laughing and he hadn't leaped like a mountain goat, but he'd done it. Holding Rey was a snap in comparison.

So why were his legs having problems holding him up? Their eyes met and they moved as one. He bent down to her again just as she lifted her face to meet his. The kiss was long and deep, his cock rising painfully every time his tongue touched hers. He lifted his head again and smile down into her eyes. Might as well just as it---seeing as we've come this far.

"So---we headed for the bedroom?" Please God, let the answer be yes.

If it wasn't, he was going to howl. Tonight his fist simply wouldn't be enough for the blue steeler hard-on in his pants. she nodded. _Yes!_

Another kiss that had his thigh muscles clenching. He was about ready to carry her off to the bedroom when the three molecules of brain matter he had left rang a warning bell. The house was large, particularly for a single woman. It had been her family's home. It was large enough for him to have to ask where her bedroom was.

He knew perfectly well where her bedroom was. He'd been in her house twice---he'd picked her locks while she was in the library, combing the house for clues to who she was. Initially, it had been to find out certain weaknesses, things he could use for leverage for intel. Drugs would have been good. Lots of alcohol would have been good, too. Or maybe a stash of heavily used vibrators or sex toys, though, he'd sincerely hoped not at the time. Addictions were like a door with a WALK THROUGH ME a sign on it.

Weaknesses, champagne tastes on a beer budget, sexual deviancy--they were all chinks in the armor, chinks he wouldn't hesitate to use. Thank God there'd been nothing.

Mara had put him right off that stuff. If he ever saw a fur-lined handcuff, if he never fucked a woman who was high in his ife, he'd be delrious. As it happened, there was nothing in Rey's house but beautiful furinture, books and paintings. Rey's life was as easy to read as a book, appropriately though, because her house was completely full of them.

Full of CDs, too. The bought kind, which he thought was a bit of an overkill in the upstanding citizen department. He was a law enforcement officer and he hadn't bought music since 2001. Rey did, which spoke volumes as to who she was as a person. There were watercolors everywhere, all signed by her mother.

The house, he realized now, was a reflection of her. Elegant, classy, feminine. Another kiss that had his thigh muscles clenching.

"Which way to your bedroom?" he asked against her mouth.

He already knew the answer. Corridor to the left. First door to the right---like clock work.

"Corridor to the left," she said. "First door to the right." He stared moving as soon as the words were out of her mouth. She looked up at him, wide-eyed. "You're going to carry me to the bedroom?"

"Oh, yeah."

It was the fastest way to get there. He needed fast because he was burning up. He needed fast before his knees gave out and he tumbled with her to the floor. If they fell on the floor, he'd fuck her there, which was not good. Not romantic. This had to be romantic. He could do romantic, couldn't he? Since when wasn't he in control?

* * *

Since well about five minutes ago, apparently. He was kissing her and panting and sweating by the time he made it into her bedroom and gently put her down onto her feet. It would be easier to get her clothes off if he could just stop kissing her, but that seemed beyond his ability. He had one hand around the back of her head and he was fumbling with her clothes with the other.

Damn! Why didn't he have three hands so he could undress himself at the same time? He worked fast. Sweater, bra, skirt, stockings--thigh-highs! Yes!---panties and finally her shoes. _Ding!_ Rey done. He lifted her again and placed her down on the bed.

An uncharitable observer would have said he threw her on the bed, so hard that she bounced. Now it was his turn. 

God, he broke the land-speed record for undressing. Overcoat, shirt, undershirt, pants, briefs, shoes and socks. Put on a rubber in record time. Thank _God_ he wasn't on a mission because then it would have taken him minutes to get out of his shoulder rig, get rid of the ankle holster, unhook the spare magazines and flashbangs, lose the combat knife and sheath.....

No wonder soldiers didn't fuck while out in the field. It took them an hour just to get undressed. Finally, finally, he was naked and looking down at an equally naked Rey, spread out on the bed, a lusciously little soft pale morsel, arranged solely for his delight.

As stoked as he was, as horny as he was, as much as he wanted to jump her bones, he paused for just a moment to look at her, the pale perfection of her. 

Besides that delicate, slender body, all female grace, the expression in her beautiful eyes was enough to stop him dead in his tracks. Softness, humor, affection......

It wasn't what he was used to seeing in his sex partners. He was used to seeing lust and desire, and no emotions at all. He frowned. Was she turned on? Or was she all wrapped up in this romantic fantasy she'd created inside her head? Only one way to find out for sure.

Ben leaned down and clasped his hand around her ankle, pulling her leg out a little, anchoring it to the mattress. He was sidetracked for a second by the sight of her foot emerging from his dark fist. God, even her feet were lovely. High-arched, narrow pink-tipped toes. Good enough for him to eat. If he were to start at her toes, though, it would take him all night. Perahps some other time.

His eyes tracked from her pretty feet, up and over the narrow ankles, up the long length of her legs and....ah. There is was, the source of all delight.

Here, too, she was perfection itself. A little cloud of pale brown pubic hair surrounding puffy pink tissues that, yes, thank you, God, glistened. It was official. She was turned on. He could finally get going. Well, one last thing before he did.

Ben let go of her ankle and slowly ran his fingertips up her leg, enjoying every inch of the trip. She was smooth and warm and entrancing. He slowed his hand down to savor the sensations, watching her eyelids droop a little. Oh yeah, she's ready. Her cheeks were tinted with pink now, as were her nipples.

He could her heartbeat in her left breast, rocking the soft tissues. She was getting turned on by his finger on her leg. Oh, and maybe what she could read in his eyes.

"Kylo," she whispered.

"We're getting there, sweetheart," he answered. Oh God, this was just such a delight.

Finally, his hand arrived where it desperately wanted to be, against her soft little cunt. She was wet and getting wetter by the second. His finger was enough to call up moisture out of her body, which he spread against the lips of her sex. He then dipped his index finger into her, just a little, and felt her jolt and sigh.

He pressed his free hand against her knees, pressing it closer to the bed, opening her more for his touch. The instant she understood what he wanted, she spread her legs for him.

Ben could barely tear his eyes away from her---pink and puffy and soft. Her eyes were closed now and he knew she must be concentrating on the sensation of his hand on her, at times inside her. She sighed. He could keep this up forever, just touching her lightly in the silence of the night, but when he glanced down at himself, he realized he'd better do this the old-fashioned way before he blew all over her belly and embarrassed himself and her.

He was enormous, red and swollen and hard as a club. His hand was having a good time and his head was, too, but his cock was protesting in earnest. _Do it right or I'm out of here. Okay,_ he told his dick. It always had been a hard-ass.

Keeping his right hand cupping her cunt, he leaned his left onto the mattress, right next to her sharp little hip bone and mounted her. Now the sensations changed.

He no longer felt a dreamy sort of pleasure, as if in a daze. Now the feelings were sharper, harsher, keener. Acute and hard-edged. No more slow, dreamy emotions, no more enjoying her with all his senses. Now he had only one sense and that was concentrated between her legs.

Using two fingers, he opened her up, fitted himself to her and thrust, harder than he intended. He gritted his teeth against the pleasure, holding his shaking torso up on one arm so that he wouldn't crush her to death, his breathing hard through his nose.

Jesus, she was tight. Incredibly tight. A little blood drifted up into his head. He frowned. _Too_ fucking tight. He then looked down at her. She looked uncomfortable, almost in pain. Goddammit, she's--she's not, is she?

"Rey," he croaked. "Please tell me that you're not a virgin."

She looked up at him, appalled. "Oh my God," she whispered. "It doesn't grow _back,_ does it?"

A laugh immediately exploded out of his chest and somehow hearing those words exited his cock and he collapsed onto her, laughing uncontrollably and coming in equally excited long bursts. So their first time together hadn't been what either of them had imagined, okay, it happens.

But Ben felt certain as they continued making love for what seemed like hours on end, a trial and error. He felt certain that with Rey, they would have plenty of time to figure this thing out between them---the sex was only just a plus. However, as Ben snuggled close next to Rey later in the middle of the night, his mind drifted in and out of focus as he slept---Hux, her, this entire mission.

He was putting not only her but himself in jeopardy---this mission was everything and he could not fail. And that's what made this whole thing more of a harder pill to swallow.

* * *

Hux stared into the fire, listening to the silence of the house. Normally, he listened to music at night. Some nights it relaxed him enough to sleep. Most nights, though, he sat in his armchair, hoping to keep all the bad memories at bay. He didn't want music or vodka or even the company of one of his own men.

He needed _her_ , needed to talk to her. Oh how he longed for that connection with Kira---with Rey. That soft female energy wrapped in such a beautiful package, truly a gift of the gods. Kira had been his soulmate; she'd kept him going when he sank into one of his depressions. He felt completely bereft, half a creature.

He'd thought his heart and soul had died with Kira, but this new Kira had revived him. He was whole again.

Once Kira was completely his once more, he could turn back the clock. He had the power to do what only the gods could do, bring back his Kira. _Rey._ He cursed under his breath. Lately he'd caught himself several times calling Rey...Kira.

He stopped at the first syllable and Rey thought he was calling her a cat. He covered it up by saying she reminded him of a cat. Elegant, self-contained, with brilliant darkened eyes. She smile ever single time. And yet---and yet she _was_ Kira. Nothing would convince Hux that Rey wasn't the reincarnation of his very heart.

True, he hadn't been able to save Kira. She'd been tossed into a pitch-black hole with ravening sharp-toothed monsters at the bottom. The scene came to him nightly, with a drumbeat of slick sweat and panic. The scene was always the same.

The frozen tundra stretching for eternity, gray and featureless, the strongest fence imaginable---ten thousand miles of frozen nothingness.

No one ever escaped alive across that endless, frozen fence. The prisoners---most of them sick, dehydrated, half-starved, and without enough clothes for the subzero temperatures--had been herded out from the train wagons like cattle. Blinking dazedly in the meager winter sunlight, the first sunlight they'd seen in over ten days, they'd tumbled out of the freight wagon on unsteady limbs, half-dead already merely from the long journey.

Hux had tried to shield Kira as best as he could through the endless journey. He'd given her his coat and had maneuvered her against the wall with his back to the pack to give her a modicum of privacy.

He had no food or water to give her, nor comfort. They both knew what was coming. They'd heard the stories. Hux had once interviewed a zek from Stalin's camps for a newspaper article. They knew. Kira knew. They spoke very little through the endless journey. There was little to say.

Hux had done his vest to hide Kira from the guards when they stumbled down the ramp, but it didn't work---couldn't work.

Kira moved like a beautiful woman. He'd put his coat over head and ordered her to walk hunched over, like an old lady. But Kira's beautiful ankles had been visible. And snatches of her glorious dark hair slid out from the tight bun to curl around her shoulders.

Hux's heart sank when he heard the first guard cry out, a wolf scenting fresh meat. In a second, the whole pack had descended, ripping her out of his arms, carrying her away, meat for the night.

Hux could still hear her screams, see her slender white arm outstretched, drowning in a sea of louts. He'd fought as hard as an intellectual could. But these were brutal men, one step up from the prisoners they guarded, and used to violence. One blow from a guard's rifle and he went down like a felled bull.

When he gained consciousness to the sounds of Kira's screams, he realized they lasted all day and all night. Through a small window in the freezing hut where the new zeks had been herded, Hux could see the guards lined up, most with their pants open, rigid cocks out. Waiting for their turn to fuck the beautiful Moscow intellectual. Laughing and smoking. Going back to the end of the line once they'd had their turn.

Some hadn't seen a woman in decade. By the second day, the screams stopped. Hux had been utterly helpless to save Kira. A zek in a prison camp was nothing, not even worth the air it breathed. 

Less than the dirty snow on the bottom of a prison guard's boot. Less than the shit in the latrines.

Yes, he'd lost Kira, but he'd found her again. Kira had come back to him. And he wasn't a helpless zek now, oh no. He was rich and powerful beyond measure. He commanded billions of dollars, thousands of men and women. He bought the governments of countries and bent them to his will.

He was the Vor. And soon he would have the power to destroy cities, sweep everything before him in his revenge against the world. Everything was possible again with Kira by his side.


	8. Chapter 8

Ben woke up in heaven, or at least that's what it sounded like. Soft harp music played somewhere, as gentle and harmonious as he'd imagined music in heaven would be, not that he'd ever imagine actually waking up to the Big Op in the Sky. It felt like heaven, with a soft down comforter with big cabbage roses resting lightly over his naked body, his head cushioned on an even softer pillow of clouds.

God, it even smelled like heaven. Roses and lavender. The scent of clean sheets and furniture polish, freshly baked cinnamon buns, and something light and flowery, utterly feminine. And all over it, the smell of sex.

Oh yeah. If there was a heaven, there'd definitely be sex, just like he'd had all night. Exactly like that.

Ben smiled, swept his hands over the mattress, and opened his eyes when his right hand encountered nothing but smooth sheet. Well, almost heaven. Something was missing. Someone. 

He threw back the lavender-scented comforter and sat up, looking around him. Last night he'd been too blasted by lust to notice, but how he missed the beauty of the bedroom when he'd come in on his recon prowl through the house? It looked like something out of a magazine, only a place where people lived, not an empty stage. 

Polished hardwood floor. Big high bed with an antique carved wooden headboard, antique chest of drawers polished to a high-gloss, two tea-rose-colored small armchairs with a pie crust table between them. Pretty, feminine knickknacks, small-rosebuds in a blue vase, some fabulous landscape watercolors, a bookshelf full of books, all neatly arranged.

Still Life of Lady's bedroom.

He glanced outside the window. It had snowed all night and there was at least a foot of snow. A big maple tree outside in her garden looked like a big fluffy cloud. Well, of course. Heaven. Ben rolled out of bed, lifted up on the balls of his feet and stretched, feeling refreshed, revved even.

It wasn't just the fabulous sex, though there was nothing guaranteed to fire the system like it. Unlike the horrifying sex he'd had with Mara-Jade, which left him feeling drained and depleted. Sex with Rey was like being side a rocket, going off.

Plus, he'd slept. Like really slept, for the first time in what felt like forever. A deep sleep that wiped out all traces of the grainy fatigue that had been gumming up his head for the past year.

He'd never slept the entire night though in his time undercover with the Gonzalez clan. Each second that passed could bring something that would blow Ben's cover, something completely out of his control. If Gonzalez decided to come after him, he'd do it at night. Ben forced himself to nap instead of sleep, and to wake up at regular intervals, scan his surroundings for danger signals, then allow himself to fall back into a sleep so shallow he would become combat ready in a second.

It was the way soldiers slept in the field, under fire. In combat, shallow sleep could save your life. 

In danger, you're operational in a matter of seconds. As a way of life, though, it pumped the body full of cortisol, the by-product of stress, sure bad way to waste the kidney's of it went on for too long. In Ben's case, it had been going on for a long time---in Afghanistan and the year with Gonzalez. His kidney's were probably shot to hell.

He was going to die young, anyways. It was something he knew deep down, in his bones and blood. He'd always known it. It was what made him so fearless as a solider. Might as well go down fighting.

So the sleep he'd had, had been like a little gift of life. He knew why'd slept so deeply and so well, besides the delightful sex. Deep down in his blood and his bones, the part of him that hold him to duck a millisecond before the bullet whistled by, that whispered to him to recheck his weapon for the tenth time and recheck his parachute, told him there was no danger in Rey's home to him.

Not at all. Nothing here to harm him, so unlike the Land of Bad Things where he felt he'd spent the most of his life. At ease, soldier, he told himself.

Thought it wasn't necessary to think the words. His body had told him that already. He knew from the lack of muscle tension that he was in a safe environment. Safe and beautiful and welcoming.

No one knew he was even here. He hadn't been tailed, he's made sure of it. And while Poe Dameron and Jannah might suspect he'd seduced the pretty librarian, they couldn't be certain. So no one knew where he was, and there was no danger to him while he was in this house. No danger at all.

Not even sharp edges. Only soft furniture in pastel colors, pretty music, nice smells, and one hell of a pretty woman. And speaking of which.....

Ben eyed his clothes on the floor. He had zero desire to put on his formal clothes. Suit pants, dress shirt, jacket, _ack._ He had a pair of jeans and a sweater in a bag in the trunk of the car; he'd wear those later today. But right now, all he wanted was Rey. A little clatter of noise from the kitchen told him exactly where she was. 

He padded naked across the living room and stopped at the kitchen door, watching her. She kept her back to him, humming softly. 

Ben had been trained in hard places to move silently. Rey had no clue that he was even standign there, so he was able to look to his fill. The CD had changed to a medley of Celtic music. Ben recongized the song that was playing, though he didn't know the title of the song. Something about green fields and coming home, which was more or less like every Irish song he'd ever heard.

The Irish weren't big on love songs. The music mostly celebrated survival and comradeship, the basic elements of Ben's life so far.

Rey knew the words and was singing softly under her breath. She had on pink track suit that hugged her slender curves, her dark hair shifting on her shoulders as she waggled her head to the music. That pretty ass swayed, too, as she fussed in her kitchen.

The kitchen was as pretty as she was. Cream and peach tiles, a line of thriving herbs in cream-colored pots along the windowsill, light-colored curtains at the window. Big ceramic canisters along the counter against the backsplash. And the smells--almost better than the smells in the bedroom. The surprisingly rich smell of tea threaded in among the smells of something with cinnamon baking in the oven.

A small pinewood table was set for two, with slices of bread, butter, an array of jams and jellies, and slices of apple. Ben could see a fantastic breakfast in his immediate future.

He watched her swaying gently to the beat of the music, listened to her singing. Though her voice was soft, it was surprisingly true. Everything about the scene before him was delightful. Beautiful woman. Beautiful music. Beautiful room. Sheer delightful. 

Ben felt something odd move inside him, something he didn’t recognize. It rolled right through him, and whatever it was, it left a sense of peace and contentment in its wake. 

He stood there, mulling that over. Peace and contentment. 

They weren’t things he felt very often in his life. He’d never sought out after them, never wanted them. His life was one long mission and he did whatever it too to get the mission accomplished. Peace and contentment simply just didn’t factor in. His mission in the orphanage where he grew up, for him and Jake. Then as a Delta operator, accomplishing the op, whatever it was. Usually the op meant danger in hellholes.   
  
And now, since he’d joined the Unit, the mission was putting away bad guys where they belonged....for good. 

So what was this new feeling? Leaning against the doorframe, watching a woman fiddle with the stove? What was it? The mission? An op? No, it felt like something more. No, this felt like something else entirely. Ben wasn't completely comfortable with all these....new things going on inside him. He was only comfortable in his skin. He knew what he wanted in life and he usually went after it like a bullet to the bull's eye.

But this....this felt completely new.....different. And good. Definitely good. In fact, he felt better than he could ever remember feeling and it was all because of her. Rey.

Unexpectedly, Rey turned around, as If she'd suddenly sensed his presence, and smiled at him. In an instant, that supernatural feeling of well-being disappeared, as if it had never been. _Whoosh_ , gone. In its place came a burning, hot, itching feeling, a drive to touch her, to touch that smooth, creamy skin he knew was underneath the soft pink cotton of the track suit. To put his hands on her and never let go.

"Good morning." he said with a sensual smirk, completely unashamed of his nakedness.

"Hi, so you're up...." Her voice trailed off as her gaze suddenly dropped and her face went from slight flush of someone cooking to stoplight red.

Rey's soft pink mouth made an O. Oh yeah, he was all right. Massively for so early. It was as if his cock were trying to stretch it's way across the room to her. It couldn't, obviously, but he could. It took him a second or two to firm up his knees and then he was crossing over to her, eyes never leaving hers. She looked down at him again and heat washed over him, as if he'd walked in front of an open oven door. The heat even pulsed in like hot liquid in his veins.

He was clenching his jaws so hard his teeth hurt. This was sex but it was so much more than just sex. He wasn't hurting for sex and they'd been at it practically all night. By rights, he should be all fucked out.

Right now, instead, it was as if he'd never fucked before, never touched a woman in his entire life. This felt urgent, with all the adrenaline of combat in the field, the moves as necessary as ducking under fire or scrambling out of the way of flames of bullets. This was a place he'd never been in before, a foreign country. Ben didn't do urgent, pressing desire. He was the Iceman. Whenever he fucked, a part of him---a big part---remained detatched, observing. Sex made men drop their defenses.

A lot of guys got offed while boffing. Not Ben. There was no way that anyone could get the drop on him during sex because he was always aware of what was going on, always cool. Iceman.

Oh Jesus, he wasn't the Iceman now, though. He was burning up, breathing hard, focused like a laser beam on Rey. He wasn't even thinking about what he was doing. His body had take over completely. Moving fast, Ben hooked a chair with his foot and plonked down onto it while reaching out for Rey.

Hands a blur, he had her sweats and panties down in a second, positioned her over him, opened her with his fingers and thrust. Straight up into her soft little cunt.

_Ahhh! Fucking Christ!_

* * *

Sweat beaded on his face, a drop trickling down the side of his face dropping onto her shoulder. He was holding her so tightly she was probably having trouble breathing but he couldn't seem to let her go, or even relax his death-like grip. He was holding onto her like you held on to a lifeline, not to a beautiful woman. 

He leaned forehead against hers, eyes closed tight. "Sorry," he whispered roughly.

 _Fuck._ She was dry, not ready for penetration, wriggling a little to find a comfortable position, to adjust herself to him. Her toes barely reached the ground, so almost the full weight of her body anchored her to him. Shit, he hoped he wasn't hurting her, but he wouldn't take any bets on it.

"No, you're not," she whispered back. "You're not sorry at all."

His eyes opened. He'd kept his eyes screwed shut because of what was happening inside him was overwhelming, but also because what he had left of his brains told him she'd be furious. You don't jump a woman, strip her down, and shove your cock in without even a second's foreplay. He was half expecting her to tell him to fuck off and get out of her house. But no---wow--against all odds, she wasn't angry.

How the hell did that happen? When his eyes opened, they were an inch away from hers. He stared into those eyes, completely mesmerized.

That warm, hazel, like an stretch of grass in an open field. There were slightly crinkles around her eyes as if she were smiling at him. Yes, thank you, God. Ben's gaze dropped to her mouth, slightly up-tilted. That was definitely a smile. Oh yeah, it was. He leaned forward and kissed her, a long deep plunge into that smile. 

When his tongue stroked hers, she clenched around him, gasping into his mouth. She wasn't furious at being manhandled, at the suddenness with which he'd grabbed her, at being held ferociously tight.

"No, you're right, I'm not," he croaked back when he came up for air.

Hell no, he wasn't sorry. He'd never be sorry. He'd kill to remain right where he was, naked on a wooden chair with his cock buried in the most delightful woman he'd ever met. Ben smiled back. Or he tried to, that is. His mouth couldn't make the right moves. How could he smile when every atom in his body was concentrated on her, the feel of her against him and above all, the tight, warm feel of her cunt around his cock?

There was something about that thought that rang a warning bell somewhere far away inside of his head. Something about the feel of her.....tight and just a little wetter now and warm....

Something about that didn't feel right. Or rather, felt all too good. Better than anything had ever before.... _.Fuck!_

He wasn't wearing a rubber. His head nearly exploded. This was impossible. Ben never fucked anyone without a rubber, never. Never, ever, ever! He knew exactly what was out there and though he expected to die young, he wanted to go out like a man from a bullet or a knife to the heart and not hooked up to machines in a hospital. _Gah_! Better a bullet than a disease. No question.

Suiting up was second nature, simply part of the sexual act. As natural as brushing his teeth. He never went anywhere without rubbers and had even brought them with him to Afghanistan, not that there'd been any chance of using them in that hellhole.

They'd expired in his pocket and were probably dust now in his flak jacket in the basement of his condo. But right now, in his pants pocket on the floor of her bedroom were several packets of brand-new-top-of-the-line-rubbers, just waiting for him. They might as well have been on Mars for all the good they were doing him here. The normal way to get them would be to withdraw from Rey, get up and walk over there, but every cell in his body reject that notion.

He couldn't pull out of her if they put a gun to his head. Not to mention the biggie---he was on a hair trigger here. Yep. Benjamin Solo, Mr. Cool, Iceman, himself, who had fucked Mara-Jade for hours while calculating probabilities that her dick-wad brother was changing lieutenants, was about ready to blow.

He could feel it, a volcanic pressure rising within him from his loins, the little electric tingle along his spine, all telltales he was all too familiar with.

Just Rey breathing caused a little rustle in his system, bringing him that much closer to shooting his wad. Any sudden movements, any at all, would just push him over the edge. Pulling out would mean friction, sliding out of those smooth, soft, warm walls...

 _Oh God_. He had to tighten his groin to keep from cumming at the thought. If he pulled out he'd embarrass himself by spurting into the air. Or worse---into her. He stared into her eyes, shaking slightly from the effort of not cumming.

"I'm not wearing a ru--a condom." His voice was hoarse, as if he'd spent hours screaming. His throat was tight. Huge steel hands were gripping his chest. "I'm really sorry about that, Rey."

If she wanted to haul off him and hit him, she'd have every right to. He couldn't even flinch because any movement was a no-no. All he could do was stare in the eyes and take it like a man. Rey, however was still---silent. That somehow scared him even more than the thought of no rubber on his cock. Say something, please.

"Sorry," he said again. 

It came out a wheeze. With every second that passed everything within him wound tighter. His cock in her lengthened, thickened, and then---whoa---she clenched around him. His cock responded immediately with a strong ripple. He bit back his teeth together so hard it was a surprise he didn't crack a tooth. His head was going to literally explode. And right after that, his cock.

He was shaking all over, trying to rein himself in. _God, Rey, I'm going to---_

"It's all right, Kylo." Rey's face was an inch from his. She was somber but her body was trembling. All on it's own, her little cunt clenched again and they both moaned. "It's not the right time of the month, so there should be any prob---"

Whatever else she was going to say was lost in his mouth. He closed the little distance between them, holding onto her tightly, ravishing her mouth, thrusting hard up inside her while cumming in long, almost violent spurts that shook him from his toes to his head. He ate her mouth, as if his life depended on it. Maybe it did. He felt one long hot liquid pull through his body, from his mouth to his cock, drowning inside her. He shook and groaned throughout the climax, grinding himself into her, totally out of control.

He left her mouth because he was afraid that he'd bite her in his excitement, and buried his face in her hair, hanging on to her as if he was drowning and she was his lifeline to shore.

His skin prickled, his chest felt tight, he was burning up. He felt especially hot in his groin, right where he was joined to her. Hot and wet. He'd spurted so much cum into her, they were wet to their thighs. It should have been a turnoff, but it was actually a huge turn-on. Huge.

Knowing that his seed was inside her. And in particular, knowing she was not wet. Not wet because he'd managed to get in a little foreplay, no, not that kind of wet. But still. Wet is wet. Wet meant he could move in her without hurting her.

First, though, some amends. "Sorry about that," he whispered. "I couldn't---I couldn't hold back anymore. You just---you feel _really_ good."

His breath moved a lock of her shiny dark hair. Sorry. Ben didn't believe in a God, but if he did, he deserved to be struck down by lightning immediately because he wasn't sorry. Not at all. Not only was he not sorry in any wat that he was buried to the hilt in the warmest, tightest little cunt he could ever remember being in, but he was not sorry for anything about the situation at hand.

Her soft breasts were plastered against his chest, rubbing against him with every breath that she took, his arms tight around her narrow rib cage.

"T-That's okay, Kylo." Was that a wheeze he heard in her voice? Thought it cost him, Ben gentled his hold slightly. She had to breathe.

Since his mouth was right there, he blew another perfumed lock of hair away from her neck and began kissing her, running his lips along the soft skin of her neck, kissing the even softer skin behind her ear. Her hair tumbled over his face and it was like being in a soft, perfumed raven haired dark cloud.

His lips picked up the beat of her heart, fast and light. He could feel that beat against her left breast, too. Was it excitement? Only one way to find out. He eased back a little, wondering which hand to use. They were both extremely happy exactly where they were. If there was any justice in this world, he'd sprout a third hand so he could touch here where they were joined without letting go, but he'd learned long ago that there wasn't. So, which hand to use? 

The one cupping the back of her head or the one wrapped around her back, fitting precisely into the sharp ident of her waist? God, what a choice.

Finally, reluctantly, his right hand left her waist, trailed around her back, over the top of her thigh and rested on her mound. Rey wiggled a little on him and he surged and lengthen inside her. She caught a little breath, the sound loud in the silence of the kitchen. 

"You're still, um---" she wiggled on him some more, the movements so exciting his stomach muscles jumped. "Stil....hard," she finished breathlessly.

"Goddamn right, I am."

 _Hard? Oh yeah, hard doesn't even describe what I feel right now_. He brought his mouth around to hers and kissed her deeply, like plunging into a sea of warm, scent flowers. He opened his mouth more widely, taking in a shaper taste of her. Her arms curled around his neck, one hand toying with the soft hair at the nape of his neck. Ben fisted his hand in her hair and pulled gently. Her head fell back and he admired the long line of her white throat. Wow, maybe even vampires weren't do dumb after all, because right now, he felt like growing razor sharp canines and feasting on her flesh.

Failing that, he nipped her, right where her neck met the smooth line of her shoulder. Rey jolted. Inside and out. A sharp clenching of her cunt and he swelled inside of her.

She gasped and twined her legs around the legs of the chair, impaling herself more heavily on him. It was all he needed.

Wrapping his arms around that narrow back, Ben began moving inside her, sharp short thrusts, made easier by the all the gallons of cum he'd flooded inside of her. It was as intense as hell and couldn't possibly last long enough. When she gave a sharp cry and started climaxing, he shouted and thrust up into her one last, hard jolt and exploded.

He had no idea he had all that cum in him, seeing as how he'd just climaxed moments before. Maybe his spine melted and drained straight to his dick.

Maybe he was using up all the liquid in his body and would dry up and blow away into dust. Whatever. He was happy, content, and well spent. His cock was proof of that, even as he felt it still leaking inside of her. 

"Wow," Rey whispered.

She lay with her cheek against his shoulder, arms looped around his neck, her body completely relaxed against his. Their groins were wet, stuck together by his juices and hers. He was just still hard enough to stay inside her. If she moved, he'd slip out but for now she wasn't moving and he loved being inside of her still.

It was.....pleasant. No, more than pleasant. She was the softest thing he'd ever felt beneath his hands, soft and warm and fragrant. Ben felt he could stay like this forever. She flattened her palm against his back in small caresses then stopped, puzzled. A swift pass over the spot as she rubbed her cheek against his shoulder.

He knew exactly what she was feeling. A circular puckered scar on the front with a matching circular scar on his back.

"That's my most embarrassing scar," he said easily, running his hand up and down her back. "I never tell anyone the story, but, I'll tell you, if you promise to feed me whatever it is you cooked in the oven that smells so damn good."

"Deal and it's cinnamon buns." He could feel her lips move as she smiled against his shoulder. "Unless they're burnt. And if they are, it's entirely your fault."

"Fair enough." He kissed her hair. "So this is the story. When I was about eighteen years old, my aunt Milly moved in next door to us. She only stayed about a year but in that year, she elected me her own personal slave. I helped the moving guys bring her furniture in. She loaded me down with too much stuff, mostly for the upstairs bedroom. One of the moving guys had dropped a soap dish on the stairs. I tripped and fell. Straight onto a brand-new steel curtain rod. Skewered me but good."

She shuddered. "Ouch." Talk about no good deed going unpunished." Rey fingered the scar on his back, then bent down to kiss the scar on his shoulder. "That must have really hurt."

Like a bitch. And it hadn't been a curtain rod at all; nor was there any Aunt Milly or moving guys involved; it had been a 9mm round. The round that had nicked his lung and finished his army career for good. He wanted to spare her the gore details as much as possible---so, as his profession, he lied.

He pulled back and smiled into her eyes. "Now how about those cinnamon buns you were talking about? I'm starving."


	9. Chapter 9

Ben followed Rey back to her house, staring at the back of her car as if he could will her to stop, get out, and let him get behind the goddamned wheel. He hated this. Why couldn't she have just left the car where it was? He'd dropped hints aplenty, had even contemplated an order, but though she stated her wishes in the softest voice possible, Rey was like a rock.

She just lifted that pointed little chin of hers and that was the end of that. She wanted her car and she going with him without him to get it. In this weather going without him wasn't even an option, so with gritted teeth he'd driven her to get car near the library and was following her home.

The weather had worsened---the roads were slick with ice and sleet--was a condition that Rey had totally ignored. 

Ben had to clutch the steering wheel hard to keep from shooting out in front of Rey and forcing her to slow down. Unexpectedly, his classy little librarian liked speed. That was fine, but no on a day like this and not when he suspected she couldn't quite handle her car. It slid when she braked and took corners. His jaws clenched each time.

He longingly eyed the cell phone on the passenger seat. He could call her and tell her to slow down. Make it seem like he couldn't keep up, which was ridiculous for anyone who knew him. There wasn't a vehicle in the world he couldn't drive, as fasted as he wanted, in any kind of weather. He was a qualified combat driver instructor and was considered one of the best. His cell phone then buzzed.

Not Rey. Ben smiled when he saw the display on the front screen. Anthony "Chewie" Carmichael, his best friend. He switched his cell phone to speakerphone mode.

"Hey, Chewie. How is it hanging?" It was their usual greeting and was usually answered in unprintable ways.

"Hey there big guy, guess what? I did it!" Chewie was too excited to engage in their usual banter. Ben could hear it in his voice. _"Yee-haha or hooh-ahh!_ Or whatever it is you military types say. I did it!"

Ben just rolled his eyes. At any given moment, Chewie was accomplishing a bazillion different things, not least accumulating more money than a third world country. "IT" could have been buying Microsoft, doubling the income of a Saudi prince or single-handedly raising the world price of gold. Chewie was one of the prime financial geniuses of the world. That wasn't Ben's opinion, it was Bloomberg's. Whatever "it" was, though, it had Chewie in a start. 

"Great. Glad to hear it." 

Chewie couldn't see Ben's shrug but he could probably hear it in his voice. Ben just wasn't into money, to Chewie's everlasting sorrow. "What the hell did you do? Buy Corsica?"

"No, though I did purchase a resort....never mind. Listen, do you remember those Russian bonds I told you about?"

Chewie waited wile Ben processed. Should he like and say of course he remembered? Chewie was smart as a whip. He knew whenever Ben was lying. No, wait....Ben remembered something. Vaguely. 

Chewie didn't let the thought gel. "If you had a decent cell phone instead of that crap POS you use all the damn time, you'd see me rolling my eyes. I talked to you about investing in Russian bonds about six months ago. I talked to you for _two hours_ straight, Ben. Your head's hard but it can't be _that_ hard."

Oh yeah. Ben had taken an afternoon off from being a scumbag gopher for the Gonzalez clan and had gone to see Chewie with his family. Being with Chewie and Maria was like breathing in cool, clean air, except when Chewie talked about money, which is when Ben tended to zoom out. 

"Look, I sort of remember. You thought it would be a good deal, right?"

"Well, it turned out to be an excellent deal, thank you very much. Paid off for to one. I wasn't really expecting that until next spring, but by God, I'm looking at the e-mail right now."

Ben, instead, was watching Rey's back fender. Was that a wobble? Goddamn it, if she was having trouble holding the road, he was going to signal her to stop and have her come back to his car. The could leave hers there and he'd pick it up as soon as the weather cleared. He watched carefully as she rounded a corner, finally letting out a pent-up breath. Okay. She'd taken that one smoothly. But damn, her tires weren't suited to this weather. He'd taken a good look before she'd gotten into her car and had to bite his lips not to say anything.

"What? What was that?" Chewie had said something, something he was excited about.

Ben gave him half his attention, the other half focused like a laser beam on Rey in front of him. Bonds were infinitely less important to him than making sure that Rey didn't crash.

"If you'd been listening to me," Chewie said, in an exaggeratedly patient tone, "you'd have heard me the first time. But I'll repeat it for you. Do you remember when I told you I'd make you a millionaire? And you gave me all your money?" 


End file.
